Crystalline

How to spell crystalline

11 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce crystalline

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does crystalline mean?

1. adjectiveMade of or resembling crystals, or so clear and transparent that it looks like crystal.

Crystalline in a sentence

• The lake had a crystalline surface that mirrored the mountains perfectly.

• Under the microscope the salt revealed its crystalline structure.

Where does crystalline come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word traces back to the Greek krystallos, which originally meant 'ice' and then came to mean 'clear quartz', since the ancient Greeks believed that rock crystal was water frozen so hard it would never melt. From krystallos they formed the adjective krystallinos, meaning 'made of crystal' or 'like ice'. Latin took this in as crystallinus, and it passed into Old French and then into English in the late 1300s, at first describing things made of or resembling clear crystal. Over time the word broadened to cover two ideas: the scientific sense of matter that has formed into a regular, ordered crystal structure, and the poetic sense of something perfectly clear and transparent. The 'cryst' spelling, with its tell-tale 'y', is a direct souvenir of that Greek root, and the double meaning of 'ice' and 'clarity' still echoes in modern use.

How the word is built

• crystal (from Greek krystallos: clear ice)
• -ine (adjective suffix meaning 'of the nature of')