Silica

How to spell silica

6 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce silica

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does silica mean?

1. nounA hard, glassy compound of silicon and oxygen that occurs naturally as quartz, sand and flint.

Silica in a sentence

• The beach sand was almost pure silica, glittering in the sun.

• Workers who cut stone must avoid breathing in fine silica dust.

Where does silica come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Silica is the common name for silicon dioxide, the hard mineral that makes up sand, quartz and flint. The word was coined in scientific Latin in the early nineteenth century from the Latin silex (genitive silicis), which literally meant 'flint' or 'hard stone', the very rock that early peoples struck to make sparks and tools. As chemists isolated the substance and the element it contained, they built 'silica' for the oxide and 'silicon' for the element on the same flinty root. Because the spelling preserves that Latin silic- stem, the tricky part for writers is the middle vowel: it is an unstressed 'i' (silic-a), not the 'o' that turns up in 'silicon'. The same ancient root for hard stone still echoes in 'silex' and in the chemistry of everyday glass and ceramics.

How the word is built

• silic- (from Latin silex, silicis: flint, hard stone)
• -a (noun suffix)