Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. Any of various double sulfates of a trivalent metal such as aluminum, chromium, or iron and a univalent metal such as potassium or sodium, especially aluminum potassium sulfate, AlK(SO4)2·12H2O, widely used in industry as clarifiers, hardeners, and purifiers and medicinally as topical astringents and styptics.
- n. Informal An alumna or alumnus.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. The general name of a class of double sulphates formed by the union of aluminium, iron, chromium, or manganese sulphate with the sulphate of some other metal, commonly an alkaline metal or ammonium. Common or potash alum has the formula Al2(SO4)3 + K2SO4 + 24H2O. It is produced by mixing concentrated solutions of potassium sulphate and crude aluminium sulphate. The double salt at once crystallizes in octahedrons. Alum is soluble in water, has a sweetish-sour taste, reddens litmus, and is a powerful astringent. In medicine it is used internally as an astringent, externally as a styptic applied to severed blood-vessels. In the arts it is used as a mordant in dyeing, and extensively in other ways. When mixed in small amount with inferior grades of flour, it is said to whiten them in the process of bread-making, but its effect on the system is injurious.
- To steep in or impregnate with a solution of alum.
Wiktionary
- v. transitive To steep in, or otherwise impregnate with, a solution of alum; to treat with alum.
- n. US A graduate of a university or other institution.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. (Chem.) A double sulphate formed of aluminium and some other element (esp. an alkali metal) or of aluminium. It has twenty-four molecules of water of crystallization.
- v. To steep in, or otherwise impregnate with, a solution of alum; to treat with alum.
WordNet 3.0
- n. a white crystalline double sulfate of aluminum: the ammonium double sulfate of aluminum
- n. a double sulphate of aluminum and potassium that is used as an astringent (among other things)
- n. a white crystalline double sulfate of aluminum: the potassium double sulfate of aluminum
- n. a person who has received a degree from a school (high school or college or university)
Etymologies
- From alumnus and alumna, by removal of the non-native, gender-specific endings. (Wiktionary)
- Middle English, from Old French, from Latin alūmen. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“The Lost alum is set to guest-star on How I Met Your Mother, a show rep tells TVGuide. com.”
“The former Merck executive and Fordham University alum is giving $1 million to build a new football locker room on the university's Rose Hill campus in the Bronx.”
The Wall Street Journal: Fordham Alum Honors His Wife With Football Gift
“After a shortlived gig on the canned CW drama The Beautiful Life, the High School Musical alum is sliding back into his singing and dancing shoes to leap to “new heights” in the Tony-award winning musical.”
“Boiling the samples in alum made the blue color disappear, leaving behind only the yellow of the original green sample. 3”
“Tom, a Stanford alum, is no stranger to such awards.”
“Another Lost alum is set to appear in the CSI franchise: Entertainment Weekly reports Harold Perrineau is set to appear in an April episode of CSI: NY, as a death row inmate who finds himself in the middle of a prison riot, just as he drops a bombshell on Hill Harper’s character.”
The Tail Section » Harold Perrineau Snags CSI: NY Guest Role
“The most widely used coagulant is Aluminium sulphate, commonly known as alum; Iron salts”
“I have, I believe, at last succeeded in arranging the proper proportions, and in substituting, for the worse than useless crude alum, the alum ustum or burnt alum, which is not affected by moisture”
“Probably the alumen referred to by Pliny, as exuding from the earth, was sulphate of alumina, without potash or soda, a salt not easily crystallized, but as effective, in many cases more effective, in the operations of dyeing, as alum, which is attested by the preference given to this salt over alum for many purposes at the present day.”
“Both these substances, so different in their origin, contain all that constitutes alum, that is to say, alumina, sulphuric acid and potash.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘alum’.
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Minerals and Mineralogy
List of minerals, elements, group names and geochemistry terms encountered in the science of mineralogy. I've chosen to avoid capital letters in most examples, though a great many mineral names hon...
galkhaite, xanthoconite, pyrostilpnite, polybasite, pyrargyrite, djurleite, digenite, covellite, chalcocite, cerargirite, acanthite, aeschynite and 2608 more...
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Periodic Table of Cake
I should have known better, but once I got started on this, I realized it’s basically the same thing as Ruzuzu’s list “Let them eat cake”, with less cake.
cheese, ague, almond, alum, pan, ash, beef, tea, Baddeley, daikon, yellow, zebra and 44 more...
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emetic
Things that make you puke
lobelia, ipecac, copper sulphate, alum, mustard, apomorphine, pukeweed, green beer, happy endings, broccoli, politics, a hair caught in ... and 10 more...
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In The Colorhouse
A colorhouse - a manufactory of colors for tints, dyes, pigments, paints, glazes, &c. Terms associated with the science and history of colormaking.
All sorts of things went into color...colorhouse, Turkey red, dyebath, woad, ocher, lead white, mordant, Naples yellow, zaffer, kiln, vat, pot and 298 more...
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work these into conversation
Challenge!
legerdemain, polysemic, rupestrian, callipygian, oscitancy, numen, lucubration, asperity, amalgam, apposite, wastrel, eleemosynary and 208 more...
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Hedgepiglet
Words for things both tangible and nonanthropic
rorqual, vellus, wrasse, rainbow bee-eater, tinkershire, lemonquat, boomslang, tufted vetch, cubeb, nipplefruit, madapple, wad and 447 more...
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What, another list?
ravishing, ravenous, pronk, brinksmanship, jaspe, mottle, chasm, testy, temperament, ponder, personally, phantom and 206 more...
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Permutations
There are 17576 different sequences of three letters (26 x 26 x 26). How many of them occur in words? General rules of engagement: mononyms only, lower case preferred to upper case, short preferred...
aaargh, niqaabi, Isaac, raad, baaed, haaf, laager, aah, kamaaina, Naajaat, aak, aalii and 637 more...
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Words, words, words
I know a hawk from a handsaw
metaxu, hardy, stout, teleological, heteroglossia, thin, library, theopoetics, sturdy, petroglyph, oasthouse, alum and 16 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for alum.
fbharjo Adds a whole new meaning to alum-are-us. These
are fields to be explored. Apr 24, 2013
ruzuzu "Alum has been used at least since Roman times for purification of drinking water and industrial process water. Between 30 and 40 ppm of alum for household wastewater, often more for industrial wastewater, is added to the water so that the negatively charged colloidal particles clump together into "flocs", which then float to the top of the liquid, settle to the bottom of the liquid, or can be more easily filtered from the liquid, prior to further filtration and disinfection of the water."
-- Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Alum&oldid=551044797) Apr 24, 2013