This study concerns innovative compounds containing the first element atóm- ‘atom’, based mainly on examples from the Writt en Language Archive of the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies. Numerous compounds containing this loanword appeared in the years following the Second Word War, especially connected to Halldór Laxness’ novel The Atom Station (1948) and the modernist atom poets. Compounds containing this element have a broad range of literal referents. It became metonymic both for the modernist aesthetics and artistic forms of the atom poets and for the historical and cultural developments around the start of the Cold War when the movement emerged. The neologism frumeind ‘atom’ is not used in such transferred meanings in compounds, but tends to revert to its literal meaning ‘basic unit’ outside the context of chemistry.