Earth & SkyGreek → English
Cryolite
/ˈkraɪəlaɪt/noun
A white sodium aluminium fluoride mineral, once the flux used for smelting aluminium.
The Greek roots
κρύος
krýos
icy cold, frost
λίθος
líthos
stone
Literally: “frost stone”
The story of the word
Named in 1799 for what it looks like: a translucent white block that could be mistaken for ice, from the only large deposit ever worked, at Ivigtut in Greenland. Its refractive index sits so close to water's that ground cryolite nearly vanishes in a glass. The industrial point came later, when Hall and Héroult found in 1886 that molten cryolite dissolves alumina, which turned aluminium from a precious metal into kitchen foil.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1799
Same family
cryogeniccryospheremonolithmegalith
In a sentence
The Ivigtut mine shipped cryolite until the deposit ran out.
Smelters now make synthetic cryolite rather than digging for it.