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Definitions

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

  1. n. A common crystalline form of natural calcium carbonate, CaCO3, that is the basic constituent of limestone, marble, and chalk. Also called calcspar.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

  1. n. Native calcium carbonate, or carbonate of lime, one of the commonest of minerals. It occurs in a great variety of crystalline forms, rhombohedrons, scalenohedrons, etc.; the fundamental form being a rhombohedron with a terminal angle of 105°, parallel to which the crystallized mineral has highly perfect cleavage, so that a mass of it breaks up with a blow into a great number of small rhombohedrons. The transparent colorless variety is called Iceland spar or doubly refracting spar, and is used for the prisms of polariscopes. Dogtooth spar is a variety in acute scalenohedral crystals. Satin-spar is a fibrous, and argentine a pearly lamellar variety; the granular, compact, or cryptocrystalline varieties constitute marble, limestone, chalk, etc. Stalactites and stalagmites are forms deposited in limestone caves; calc-sinter, calc-tuff, or travertin is a porous deposit from springs or rivers which in flowing through limestone rocks have become charged with calcium carbonate. Agaric mineral, or rock-milk, is a soft white variety easily crumbled in the fingers; it is sometimes deposited in caverns. (See cut under spar.)

Wiktionary

  1. n. a very widely distributed crystalline form of calcium carbonate, CaCO3, found as limestone, chalk and marble

GNU Webster's 1913

  1. n. Calcium carbonate, or carbonate of lime. It is rhombohedral in its crystallization, and thus distinguished from aragonite. It includes common limestone, chalk, and marble. Called also calc-spar and calcareous spar.

WordNet 3.0

  1. n. a common mineral consisting of crystallized calcium carbonate; a major constituent of limestone

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‘calcite’ has been looked up 705 times, added to 3 lists, and has a Scrabble score of 11.