Magma

How to spell magma

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce magma

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does magma mean?

1. nounHot, molten or semi-molten rock found beneath the Earth's surface.

Magma in a sentence

• The geologist explained how magma rises through cracks in the crust.

• Once magma reaches the surface and erupts, it is called lava.

Where does magma come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word comes directly from the Greek magma, which meant a thick ointment, paste, or kneaded mass, and was formed from the verb massein, meaning 'to knead' or 'to mould'. Latin borrowed the term as magma to describe any dense paste or sediment, and early English used it in pharmacy and chemistry for a thick residue left behind in a mixture. Only in the nineteenth century did geologists adopt it for the molten rock beneath the Earth's surface, picturing it as a kneaded, semi-fluid mass much like the original Greek paste. The same massein root sits behind 'mass' and even 'mosaic' in some accounts, all sharing the idea of material worked together by hand. Because the spelling lands so close to the original Greek, magma keeps its tidy 'mag-ma' shape and rarely trips writers up.

How the word is built

• magma (from Greek magma: a thick paste or kneaded mass)