118 chemical elements have been identified and named officially by IUPAC. A chemical element, often simply called an element, is a type of atom which has a specific number of protons in its atomic nucleus (i.e., a specific atomic number, or Z).
The definitive visualisation of all 118 elements is the periodic table of the elements, whose history along the principles of the periodic law was one of the founding developments of modern chemistry. It is a tabular arrangement of the elements by their chemical properties that usually uses abbreviated chemical symbols in place of full element names, but the linear list format presented here is also useful. Like the periodic table, the list below organizes the elements by the number of protons in their atoms; it can also be organized by other properties, such as atomic weight, density, and electronegativity. For more detailed information about the origins of element names, see List of chemical element name etymologies.
