The element yttrium was discovered in 1794 by Finnish chemist Johan Gadolin in a mineral sample from a quarry near the Swedish village of Ytterby. Its name was formed in Modern Latin as 'Yttria' for the oxide, later 'Yttrium' for the element, directly from 'Ytterby'. The naming follows the common scientific convention of deriving element names from geographical locations of discovery. Thus, the word's logic is purely toponymic, with no further semantic morphemes to analyze; its meaning is fixed by its historical context in the periodic table.

The word is a simplex loanword. It is a modern Latin term derived from the name of a location.