vitrain
English
Etymology
From Latin vitreus (“vitreous”) + -ain in fusain;[1] compare French -ain (“-ane”).[2] Coined by British birth control campaigner and paleontologist Marie Stopes in 1918.[3]
Noun
vitrain (countable and uncountable, plural vitrains)
- A constituent of banded bituminous coal consisting of a horizontal glossy band of friable material.
- 1996, T.S. Golosinski, Guo Yuguang, Mining Science and Technology 1996, →ISBN, page 396:
- The caking behaviour of vitrain and clarain could be improved after the coal has been picked out.
- 1997, Yang Qi, Geology of Fossil Fuels: Coal, →ISBN, page 149:
- In order to measure relatively accurately the activation energy of coal, and to exclude the disturbance from coal samples, the hand-picked banded vitrains in bright coal are adopted as experimental samples (Table 1).
- 2012, C.E. Snape, Composition, Geochemistry and Conversion of Oil Shales, →ISBN, page 491:
- Thus, it may be concluded that a lower viscosity of plastic vitrain grains facilitates pores to grow and coalesce and grains to stick to one another to create intergrain pores.
Coordinate terms
References
- ^ “vitrain, n.”, in OED Online , Oxford: Oxford University Press, launched 2000.
- ^ “clarain, n.”, in OED Online , Oxford: Oxford University Press, launched 2000.
- ^ Marie C[armichael] Stopes (22 August 1918) “On the Four Visible Ingredients in Banded Bituminous Coal: Studies in the Composition of Coal, No. 1”, in Proceedings of the Royal Society, series B (Biological Sciences), volume 90, number B 633, London: […] [F]or the Royal Society by Harrison & Sons, […], published 15 May 1919, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 472:
- These four distinguishable ingredients, all of which, in varying quantities, are to be found in most ordinary bituminous coals, I name provisionally as follows:—(i) Fusain* […] (ii) Durain† […] (iii) Clarain† […] (iv) Vitrain† […]
* The French name, adopted into English by J. J. Stevenson (1911–13) and Stopes and Wheeler (1918), to replace our native unwieldy and misleading names “mother of coal” and “mineral charcoal.”
† The first use of new terms suggested by the present author, and each based on a Latin root descriptive of the substance and terminated in -ain to match fusain. The latter word is a French word used by geologists in a specialised sense.