Which metal's name comes from the Latin for Cyprus?

Copper - cuprum, from aes cyprium, the metal of Cyprus, which supplied much of the Roman world's stock. Its symbol Cu preserves the Latin.

It was the first metal people worked, because it occurs in native form as usable lumps and can be hammered cold, and the first alloyed - copper plus about ten per cent tin gives bronze, which is harder and named an age. The two ores are almost never found together, so making bronze required long-distance trade, which is why the Bronze Age is also the first period of interdependent economies.

Its modern use is electrical, and it has an underrated biological one too. Copper is antimicrobial - bacteria die on its surface within hours, unlike stainless steel - and hospital trials fitting copper door handles and bed rails have found measurable reductions in infection. It is also why some sea creatures have blue blood: haemocyanin carries oxygen on copper rather than iron, which works better in cold, low-oxygen water and is why the octopus and the horseshoe crab bleed blue.