CHARCOAL • FREE-TRANSLATOR.COM • Definition of Charcoal

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/tʃˈɑrkˌoʊl/ Listen

noun

Charcoal n.

1.

Impure carbon prepared from vegetable or animal substances; esp., coal made by charring wood in a kiln, retort, etc., from which air is excluded. It is used for fuel and in various mechanical, artistic, and chemical processes.

2.

(Fine Arts) Finely prepared charcoal in small sticks, used as a drawing implement.

Animal charcoal, a fine charcoal prepared by calcining bones in a closed vessel; used as a filtering agent in sugar refining, and as an absorbent and disinfectant.

Charcoal blacks, the black pigment, consisting of burnt ivory, bone, cock, peach stones, and other substances.

Charcoal drawing (Fine Arts), a drawing made with charcoal. See Charcoal, 2. Until within a few years this material has been used almost exclusively for preliminary outline, etc., but at present many finished drawings are made with it.

Charcoal point, a carbon pencil prepared for use in an electric light apparatus.

Mineral charcoal, a term applied to silky fibrous layers of charcoal, interlaminated in beds of ordinary bituminous coal; known to miners as mother of coal.

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Etymology of 'Charcoal'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Charcoal" Quotes from Famous Books

... huge patches of thick, black, opaque smoke; but there was a certain grandeur about it all, for work was king there. Trains ran through the streets laden with barrels of petroleum or piled as high as possible with charcoal and coal. That fine river, the Ohio, carried along with it steamers, barges, loads of timber fastened together and forming enormous rafts, which floated down the river alone, to be stopped on the way by the owner for whom they ...

— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt

... indeed a melancholy sight, and drew tears to his eyes. The ravages of the fire were almost inconceivable. Great beams were burnt to charcoal—stones calcined, and as white as snow, and such walls and towers as were left standing were so damaged that their instant fall was to be expected. The very water in the wells and fountains was boiling, and ...

— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth

... Maenseyth, hard by the Sulleh, where the foreign traders brought their ships to anchor—sometimes from Tyre itself, oftener from the Tyrian colonies down the Spanish coast; and he ruled over a peaceful nation of tinners, herdsmen, and charcoal-burners. The charcoal came from the great forest to the eastward where Cara Clowz in Cowz, the gray rock in the wood, overlooked the Cornish frontier; his cattle pastured nearer, in the plains about the foot of the Wolves' Cairn; and his tinners camped and washed ...

— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch

... of industry from the eleventh century on. We find men who were running almost monopolistic enterprises, such as preparing charcoal for iron production and producing iron and steel at the same time; some of these men had several factories, operating under hired and qualified managers with more than 500 labourers. We find beginnings of a labour legislation ...

— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard

... were fairly proficient in pictography; totemic and other designs were inscribed on bark and wood, painted on skins, wrought into domestic wares, and sometimes carved on rocks. Jonathan Carver gives an example of picture-writing on a tree, in charcoal mixed with bear's grease, designed to convey information from the "Chipe'ways" (Algonquian) to the "Naudowessies,"(22) and other instances of intertribal communication by means of pictography are on ...

— The Siouan Indians • W. J. McGee

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