Science & TechnologyGreek → English
Ceramic
/səˈræmɪk/adjective
Made of clay hardened by heat, or of the wider class of hard non-metallic materials fired at high temperature.
The Greek roots
κεραμικός
keramikós
of potter's clay
Literally: “belonging to the potter's clay”
Follow a root:κεραμικός1 word
The story of the word
Kéramos was the potter's clay and also the finished jar. The Kerameikos, the potters' quarter outside the Dipylon gate, became the main cemetery of Athens and handed archaeology its best-dated pottery sequence. English took ceramic only in the nineteenth century, borrowing it back through French. Engineers have since stretched the word far past clay, as far as the tiles that kept the Space Shuttle from burning up.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → French → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
In a sentence
The hob is ceramic, so anything dropped on it costs four hundred pounds.