Named for the Moscow Region

Moscovium honours the Moscow Oblast, the administrative region surrounding the Russian capital and containing the town of Dubna, whose Joint Institute for Nuclear Research has been one of the two or three great centres of superheavy-element discovery. The name was chosen, like dubnium before it, to acknowledge the Russian laboratory's leading role, this time invoking the wider region rather than the town itself.

Moscovium was one of four elements, with nihonium, tennessine and oganesson, whose confirmation in 2015 and 2016 completed the seventh row of the periodic table. It has no ancient, mythological or alchemical tradition, being a synthetic element of the twenty-first century with no existence outside the laboratory; its name is a geographic tribute to the Russian heartland of heavy-element research. Element 115 acquired an unusual cultural afterlife years before its official naming, having been used since 2008 as a fictional, supposedly extraterrestrial power source in the Call of Duty video game franchise's Zombies storyline, a piece of pop culture that gave the real, still-unnamed element a strange kind of fame among gamers well before chemists finished confirming and naming the actual moscovium.