English calls element 74 tungsten. Its chemical symbol is W, a letter that appears nowhere in that word. The mismatch comes from two rival names and two rival discoveries.
Tungsten is Swedish: tung, "heavy," plus sten, "stone." Swedes used it for a strikingly dense white mineral. Wordorigins.org finds it in English in a 1770 translation of Axel Fredric Cronstedt's mineralogy, which calls it "The Tungsten of the Swedes."
Around 1781 the Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele analyzed that mineral and found a calcium salt of a new acid. Etymonline dates his work to 1780; Wordorigins and the Elementymology reference say 1781. Torbern Bergman recognized the acid as the oxide of a new element and called it tungsten. The mineral itself was later renamed scheelite, after Scheele.
The second name came from Spain. In 1783 the Elhuyar brothers analyzed a different ore, wolframite, found the same new oxide, and reduced it with charcoal to the metal. They named the metal wolfram, after their ore. Some Spanish chemists still argue that this makes the brothers the true discoverers.
Wolfram is the stranger word. Etymonline calls it a German miners' term of obscure origin, recorded as "wolform" in 1562. The best-known explanation goes back to Georgius Agricola in the mid-1500s, who rendered the German name in Latin as lupi spuma, "wolf's foam." The Elementymology reference says the ore seemed to eat up tin during smelting, as a wolf eats sheep. Wordorigins quotes Agricola tying the name to an ore that lacked the metal it seemed to hold, "as if a wolf had devoured it." Etymonline offers other readings: the second part may be Middle High German ram, "soot," or the whole may be a personal name meaning "wolf-raven." So the wolf story is the traditional account, not a settled fact.
The chemists' symbol followed the Latin wolframium, which gave W. English settled on tungsten. IUPAC at first recommended wolfram, but Wordorigins says it made tungsten the standard name in 1950 while keeping the symbol. Swedish, the language that coined tungsten, now normally says volfram. Each language ended up preferring the other's word.