Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. A variety of silica that contains microcrystalline quartz.
- n. A siliceous rock of chalcedonic or opaline silica occurring in limestone.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. A cryptocrystalline variety of quartz, also called hornstone, petrosilex, or rock-flint. It is less hard than quartz crystal, has usually a conchoidal or slightly splintery fracture, is commonly gray-brown or black in color, and is often somewhat translucent. It frequently occurs in layers or concretionary nodules, especially in limestone rocks. The name is also applied to any impure flinty rock, including the jaspers.
Wiktionary
- n. geology, uncountable Massive, usually dull-colored and opaque, quartzite, hornstone, impure chalcedony, or other flint-like mineral.
- n. countable A flint-like tool made from chert.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. (Min.) An impure, massive, flintlike quartz or hornstone, of a dull color.
WordNet 3.0
- n. variety of silica containing microcrystalline quartz
Etymologies
- Unknown. (Wiktionary)
- Origin unknown. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“The Lake Superior iron formations now consist near the surface mainly of interbanded quartz (or chert) and hematite, called _jasper_ or _ferruginous chert_ or _taconite_.”
“Chert is sometimes called hornstone; also the term chert is often applied to any impure flinty rock, including jaspers.”
“And why I have begun this column with what seems like a chain of free association is something that will probably become only marginally clear to you when I tell you that it was triggered by the news, last year, of the discovery at the Natural History Museum in London of the oldest known insect fossil, embedded in a chunk of a crystalline rock from Rhynie, S.otland known as chert -- a fossil that dates from the very same S.lurian period, four hundred million years back, that saw the flourishing of the eurypterids that T.S. Eliot's "ragged claws" line unaccountably calls to my mind.”
“When all you have is a knife (only carbon blades work; stainless is too hard), you may be able to get a spark by striking its back with a sharp stone chip, such as chert or flint.”
“We don't use the kind of chert that we used to because we don't have the type of chert roads, but this will work out better because it will cut our costs down. ”
“After an hour or so of exclaiming over the thousands of flakes of chert that littered the ground, we discovered a shoulder-height vein of glistening dark chert and followed it along for a quarter of a mile until the ledge we were walking on pinched out.”
“As we scraped and dug around the house area, fire pits emerged from under the tough grass, yielding chert flakes, an occasional hammerstone or a scraper, and one melted green glass bead no larger than a pinhead.”
“The lithic debris was primarily moss agate, a cream-colored chert and the root-beer-colored chert from the four quarries on the property.”
“Dudley remarked later in a report that the chert materials “represent the entire lithic reduction sequence core, primary, secondary, tertiary, and micro flakes.””
“In addition to the flakes we uncovered two dozen fire-scorched rocks, a biface knife, a broken piece of fossiliferous chert that had been heated.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘chert’.
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Words from Blood Meridian
visage, affray, scullery, miasma, mirth, purlieu, tacit, benighted, wickiup, corral, amble, accoutre and 210 more...
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Pet Rocks and Carbon Footprints
Soil samples for stone soup.
palynology, stratigraphy, tse'bit'ai, tse bitai, tse bit ai, bitai, minette, maar, lithosphere, peridotite, gneiss, gabbro and 115 more...
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silicon
chert, flint, chip, siloxane, duralumin, thyristor, siliciureted, memory chip, quartz, glass, silicium, silundum and 18 more...
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Things from my memory
nigger baby, mexican jumping bean, puddle jumper, mood ring, pet rock, cat scratch fever, taxman, hippie, vaseline, argyrol, mercurchrome, methiolade and 655 more...
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jagosaurus's favorites
Words I like mostly because of the way they sound and feel.
ticonderoga, petulance, snark, estimable, chickahominy, feline, gezellig, gneiss, shit, willy-nilly, shelter, coda and 366 more...
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azd's Words
adamantine, abatial, ablate, ablative, abrogate, accretive, acromegaly, acrostic, actinism, actinic, acuity, adduce and 968 more...
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Reading Reading
Words from the works of Peter Reading - at least one from each (except the Schwitters-esque erosions, cut-ups etc).
overbright, pimpled, muskiness, effuse, stoup, maul, unlevel, viscid, perfidious, glibly, aloes, drouth and 449 more...
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Words from Deep Survival, by Laurence...
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looked up
Words I've come across while reading and looked up in the dictionary.
deesis, pendentive, revetment, aedicule, stemma, patera, ephod, entrepot, corbel, exedra, volute, archivolt and 1408 more...
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Just 'cause I like 'em, C
cryptoxanthin, convent, calcar, chuckle, campanile, covet, complexion, campestral, chirography, counterscarp, caliginous, catabolism and 722 more...
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The word collector
My collection of words that are intriguing, but don't fit my other lists.
snailery, aplasia, postulant, aigrette, caravel, frigate, capeskin, suffusion, schist, varlet, sepulchral, anisotropy and 317 more...
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the earth beneath our feet
Words that have to do with the earth: dirt, bedrock, grass, flowers, trees, etc.
alluvium, deposit, bedrock, clod, subsoil, undersoil, shale, sedge, hillock, macadam, bracken, chert and 1 more...
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earthwords
fka geology
palisade, escarpment, jasper, chert, quartz, geode, ruby, lapidary, sardonyx, fieldstone, feldspar
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Cormac McCarthy - The Road
stoven, bollard, travois, bindle, gimballed, excelsior, amidships, tidewrack, bracken, transom, harrowtrough, envacuuming and 34 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for chert.
bilby "Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers."
- David Foster Wallace, 'The Pale King'. Apr 5, 2011
yarb Ubi sunt the blue-green algae of yesteryear that by photosynthesis first oxygenated the atmosphere? In the black cherts of the Bulawayan Limestone Group dated at about three thousand one hundred million years old, in the stromatolitic sediments first noted by Macgregor, later corroborated by Schopf et al; that is where.
- Peter Reading, C, 1984 Aug 2, 2008
treeseed "Climb a long tall hick'ry
Bend it over, "skinnin' cats."
Playin' baseball with chert rocks
Usin' sawmill slabs for bats"
_excerpt of lyrics from Mountain Music by Randy Owen of the band Alabama
Feb 3, 2008