Solution: Chemical symbol for tungsten - NYT Crossword

“Chemical symbol for tungsten” isn’t likely to be eight letters, since you know your table of elements. So CAPITAL W is fine here. But why W? Apparently tungsten used to be called wolfram, and might one day be called wolfram, as the actual element was sort of codiscovered and given multiple (and evocative) names; tungsten is Swedish for heavy stone, but wolfram dates back to a Roman discovery of “lupi spuma,” or wolf foam, so called because tungsten dissolves (or eats, in a drooly way) tin the way that wolves gobble up sheep. When the element was added to the table, it was still going by wolfram, thus the W, and both names were interchangeable (and still might be, in some circles, although the wolfram label has disappeared).