means A class of solid, usually shiny elements that conduct heat and electricity well, bend rather than shatter, and form the bulk of everything from coins to cathedrals — and the name of a loud, distorted genre of rock.

from From Latin 'metallum' (a metal or a mine), borrowed from Greek 'metallon,' which originally meant a mine or quarry — the hole you dug things out of — before it shifted to mean the stuff you dug out. It reached English through Old French 'metal' in the medieval period. The musical sense is a 20th-century clipping of 'heavy metal,' a phrase that drifted into rock criticism for music as dense and hard as the element.