Mineral

A mineral is a naturally occurring solid substance with a fairly well defined chemical composition and an ordered, crystalline atomic structure, the definition used by the International Mineralogical Association, the body that formally recognizes new mineral species. A rock is a different kind of thing: it may be made of a single mineral or, more often, an aggregate of several different minerals occurring together, so that granite, for example, is built from quartz, feldspar and other minerals rather than being a mineral itself. As of May 2025 the International Mineralogical Association recognized 6,145 official mineral species, most of them named, by convention, for a person or a place associated with their discovery and ending in the suffix ite.