Klaproth named tellurium after Tellus, the Roman personification of the Earth, in a spirit of cosmic nomenclature that runs through his work; he had also named uranium for the planet Uranus and titanium for the Titans. The choice acquired a companion when, in 1817, Berzelius named the closely related selenium after Selene, the Moon, deliberately setting the two elements as Earth and Moon side by side. Tellurium thus anchors one of the periodic table's small celestial pairings. A curious human footnote attends it: those who work with tellurium develop tellurium breath, a persistent and powerful garlic odour, from the traces the body converts and exhales, a memorable if unglamorous mark of the earth-named element.
Tellurium ranks among the rarest of the stable elements in Earth's crust, scarcer than platinum, and much of what exists occurs bound up with gold in minerals such as calaverite and sylvanite, gold tellurides that were mined during nineteenth-century rushes in Colorado and Australia, notably around what became the town of Telluride, Colorado, which took its name from the element even though little tellurium was ever actually extracted there, the name reportedly chosen in hopeful anticipation rather than established fact.