What is the chemical symbol for gold?

Chemical symbols were standardised in the early nineteenth century by Jons Jacob Berzelius, who took them from the element names used in scholarly Latin rather than from any one modern language. Gold was aurum in Latin, a word connected to ideas of dawn light and glow, so the symbol became Au. That is why a handful of familiar metals have symbols that look nothing like their English names: iron is Fe from ferrum, lead is Pb from plumbum, sodium is Na from natrium, and tin is Sn from stannum. Every one of those elements was known and worked long before modern chemistry existed, which is exactly why they carried old names into the periodic table. Elements isolated later, such as aluminium or calcium, were named in the modern era and their symbols simply match their names. So if you meet a symbol whose letters seem unrelated to the English word, it is usually a sign the element has been in human hands for thousands of years.

Gold is one of the least reactive metals, which is why buried coins and grave goods come out of the ground still bright.