Earth & SkyGreek → English
Barite
/ˈbɛraɪt/noun
Barium sulphate in mineral form, notably dense for a non-metallic mineral.
The Greek roots
βαρύς
barýs
heavy
Literally: “the heavy mineral”
Follow a root:βαρύς5 words
The story of the word
Miners noticed the weight before chemists explained it, and the older English name barytes says the same thing in a more Greek shape. That density is now industrial: most of the world's barite is ground up and stirred into drilling mud to hold down the pressure in an oil well. Humphry Davy isolated the metal in 1808 and named barium from the same root, and a barium meal shows up on an X-ray for exactly the reason the miners noticed.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
Same family
bariumbarometerbaritoneisobar
In a sentence
A hand-sized piece of barite feels wrong in the palm, far heavier than it looks.
Barite roses form where the mineral crystallises through sand.