Gold is a highly prized precious metal that for millennia has been used as money, a store of value and in jewelry. The metal occurs as nuggets or grains in rocks and in alluvial deposits and is one of the coinage metals. It is a soft, shiny, yellow, dense, malleable, and ductile (trivalent and univalent) transition metal. Modern industrial uses include dentistry and electronics. Gold forms the basis for a monetary standard used by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). Its ISO currency code is XAU.

Gold is a chemical element in the periodic table with the symbol Au (from the Latin aurum) and atomic number 79. The adjective auric refers to something made of gold. Gold does not react with most chemicals but is attacked by chlorine, fluorine, aqua regia and cyanide and dissolves in mercury.

Notable characteristics

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Gold is a metallic element with a characteristic yellow color, but can also be black or ruby when finely divided, while colloidal solutions are intensely colored and often purple. These colors are the result of gold's plasmon frequency lying in the visible range, which causes red and yellow light to be reflected, and blue light to be absorbed. Only silver colloids exhibit the same interactions with light, albeit at a shorter frequency, making silver colloids yellow in color.

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