The Element Song Lyrics


Print a periodic table to follow along with the element song lyrics.
Print a periodic table to follow along with the element song lyrics.

The Element Song lists the chemical elements of the periodic table. Tom Lehrer set the names of the elements to the tune of  “I Am The Very Model Of A Modern Major-General” from the Gilbert and Sullivan opera buffa “The Pirates of Penzance.”

Learning the lyrics is a fun way to memorize the elements:

There’s antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium, 
And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium 
And nickel, neodymium, neptunium, germanium, 
And iron, americium, ruthenium, uranium, 
Europium, zirconium, lutetium, vanadium 
And lanthanum and osmium and astatine and radium 
And gold, protactinium and indium and gallium
And iodine and thorium and thulium and thallium.

There’s yttrium, ytterbium, actinium, rubidium 
And boron, gadolinium, niobium, iridium 
And strontium and silicon and silver and samarium, 
And bismuth, bromine, lithium, beryllium and barium.

There’s holmium and helium and hafnium and erbium 
And phosphorus and francium and fluorine and terbium 
And manganese and mercury, molybdenum, magnesium, 
Dysprosium and scandium and cerium and cesium
And lead, praseodymium, and platinum, plutonium,
Palladium, promethium, potassium, polonium, and
Tantalum, technetium, titanium, tellurium,
And cadmium and calcium and chromium and curium.

There’s sulfur, californium and fermium, berkelium 
And also mendelevium, einsteinium and nobelium 
And argon, krypton, neon, radon, xenon, zinc and rhodium 
And chlorine, carbon, cobalt, copper, 
Tungsten, tin and sodium.

These are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard,
And there may be many others, but they haven’t been discovered.

Ready to sing along?

Element Song VIdeo