What Is An Element?

An Element means different things in various industries and sciences... Here's some of the most common:

Periodic Element
Substances like metals and gases that are made up of just one type of atom. Examples are Gold, Helium, Tin and Carbon.

Electrical Element
A wire (usually coiled tightly to increase resistance) that produces a lot of heat and sometimes light. This is what makes your kettle boil and your light bulbs bright.

Traditional Elements
Older sciences such as alchemy and other archaic studies used the word element to mean things like water, ice, wind, fire, earth etc. It was thought that all things were made up of these elements mixed in different quantities.

An element is the material which is distinguished by its atomic number(number of protons or electrons). An element is a chemical substance that is made up of similar atoms and the atomic number of each atom is same. There are total 117 elements out of which 92 are naturally occurring elements and the other are artificially prepared. In addition, all these elements are used in various fields of life like steel, iron, gold etc are common examples of elements.

An element is basically a pure substance which means it cannot be broken down any further.  So pure gold contains only gold and therefore is regarded as one of the hundred or so elements in the world.
The most common elements, besides gold are iron, uranium, silver, copper, nickel, mercury, aluminium, tin, lead, carbon, hydrogen and oxygen.
An element is different from a substance, since a substance is not pure and when broken down will reveal a mixture of elements.  For example, water is a substance because this contains two atoms of hydrogen to one atom of oxygen.  Therefore it is not pure and so is a substance.
The element is however, composed of molecules which are clusters of atoms arranged in various patterns, but all containing the base element.  The structure of atoms is reminiscent of the pattern of the solar system, despite their microscopic size, since the centre of the atom is orbited by the electrons of the atom !

The simple answer is an element is a substance made up of only one type of atom. For example, oxygen, an element is only made up of oxygen atoms. Gold, an element is made up of only gold atoms. Whereas when you talk about something like water, it is made up of more than one element, i.e oxygen and hydrogen.

If your question is about chemical element then it is a type of atom which distinguished by number of protons in the nucleolus. E.g. Iron, hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, sliver, Gold and oxygen etc. There are 117 elements. For more details, visit Elements.