What is the element with the highest melting point among metals?

Tungsten is the metal with the highest melting point.

It melts at about 3422 °C, or 3695 K, under standard pressure. This exceptional heat resistance comes from strong metallic and covalent bonding involving tungsten’s 5d electrons. Its density is also unusually high, close to that of gold and uranium.

Tungsten’s history begins with the mineral wolframite. Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele identified tungsten oxide in 1781, and Spanish chemists Juan José and Fausto Elhuyar isolated the metal in 1783. The symbol W comes from wolfram, its older European name.

A common mix-up is carbon, which can withstand even higher temperatures in some conditions. At ordinary pressure, however, carbon sublimes rather than melting, so it does not have a conventional melting point there. Rhenium, tantalum, osmium and iridium are also high-melting metals, but none exceeds tungsten. Its heat resistance makes tungsten useful in furnace parts, welding electrodes, incandescent filaments and fusion-reactor components.