What is the chemical symbol for silver?

Ag, from the Latin argentum - one of the ancient metals whose symbol does not match its English name. Argentina is named after it, from a river the Spanish believed led to mountains of silver, and it is the only country named for an element.

Silver is the best conductor of both electricity and heat of any element, better than copper, and the only reason wiring is not made of it is cost. It is also the most reflective metal across the visible spectrum, which is why mirrors were silvered, and it kills bacteria - which is why silver vessels were used for water long before anyone knew why, and why silver dressings are still used on burns.

It made and unmade economies. Spanish silver from Potosi in Bolivia - a mountain worked by forced indigenous labour at enormous mortality - flowed into Europe and then largely onward to China, which had put its tax system on a silver standard, and the resulting inflation across sixteenth-century Europe was severe enough that historians call it the price revolution. The photographic industry then consumed silver for a century, and its collapse into digital freed up so much supply that the market has never quite recovered its shape.