Metal

How to spell metal

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce metal

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does metal mean?

1. nounA hard, usually shiny material such as iron, copper, or gold, typically a good conductor of heat and electricity.

Metal in a sentence

• The gate is made of painted metal that resists rust.

• Recyclers separate the glass from the metal before processing.

Where does metal come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word traces back to the ancient Greek metallon, which originally meant a mine or a quarry, the place where ore was dug out of the ground, and only later came to mean the substance extracted from it. Latin borrowed it as metallum, keeping both the sense of the mine and the metal itself, and from there it passed into Old French as metal. English took the word in the early 1300s to name the family of hard, shiny, conductive materials such as iron, copper, and gold. A useful spelling note is that the ending is the plain -al of the Latin metallum, which is exactly what separates metal from its sound-alike mettle (meaning courage and spirit) and from medal, the awarded disc. The metallurgy and metallic spellings preserve the original double l of the Latin form even though the everyday word metal kept only one.

How the word is built

• metal (single root from Latin metallum: metal, mine); no prefix or suffix