Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. Any of various ovens for hardening, burning, or drying substances such as grain, meal, or clay, especially a brick-lined oven used to bake or fire ceramics.
- v. To process in one of these ovens.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. A furnace or oven for drying, baking, or burning. Kilns may be divided into two chief classes: those for direct burning, in which the material is submitted to the action of flame, the fuel and material being mingled together in one furnace; and those for vitrifying, drying, and baking, in which the material is separated from the furnace proper. The lime-kiln represents the first class. It consists of an upright furnace resembling a blast-furnace, the limestone and fuel being fed into the top and the burned lime or quicklime being drawn below. (See
lime .) To the second class belong the pottery-kilns, brick-kilns, and porcelain-kilns. The pottery- and porcelain-kilns, which include also terra-cotta, drain-pipe, and other similar kilns, consist of a structure, usually of brick, circular in section and cone-shaped, the furnaces being arranged around the edge below, and the hollow space within being filled with the materials to be burned or vitrified. In the common pottery-kiln the materials are exposed directly to the flames from the furnaces. In the kilns for finer ware the materials are protected from direct contact with the fires. Drying-kilns for malt, hops, grain, lumber, etc., are strictly dry-houses or drying-rooms, though sometimes called kilns, Fruit-kilns are now superseded by evaporators. Brick-kilns are properly distinguished from brick-clamps by the fact that the furnace is a permanent structure. Seebrick . - To dry or burn in a kiln.
Wiktionary
- n. An oven or furnace or a heated chamber, for the purpose of hardening, burning, calcining or drying anything; for example, firing ceramics, curing or preserving tobacco, or smelting ores.
- v. To bake in a kiln.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. A large stove or oven; a furnace of brick or stone, or a heated chamber, for the purpose of hardening, burning, or drying anything
- n. A furnace for burning bricks; a brickkiln.
WordNet 3.0
- n. a furnace for firing or burning or drying such things as porcelain or bricks
Etymologies
- From Middle English kilne, from Old English cylene or cyline ("large oven"), from Latin culina ("kitchen, kitchen stove"), introduced by the Romans to England in the 1st and 2nd centuries AD. (Wiktionary)
- Middle English kilne, from Old English cyln, from Latin culīna, kitchen, stove. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“A further development of traditional smoking techniques is the adoption of the West African banda kiln known as the Ivory Coast kiln.”
“Without the kiln, which is designed to reach the perfect temperature to cause the clay to harden, the piece of clay would remain useless.”
“The operation of a vertical-shaft kiln, which is the heart of the process, is such that negligible emission takes place as the shaft kiln itself acts as an effective filter.”
“Before beginning to build a field kiln, which is sometimes called a scove kiln, it is necessary to know the following:”
“The colour inside the kiln is a good indicator of the temperature.”
“The top surface of the kiln is a flat steel sheet made by flattening old oil drums.”
“The fabrication of the kiln is a skilled operation, and so is the firing process.”
“The latter is a capital-intensive, large-scale continuous kiln, which is outside the scope of this memorandum. 1 Continuous kilns utilise heat from the cooling bricks to pre-heat green bricks and combustion air, or to dry bricks before they are put into the kiln.”
“High ground is selected for the site of the kiln, which is a rectangular wooden chamber 1.8 m high and open at the top.”
“It was found, however, that the flour of maize invariably rotted in a tropical voyage, and thereupon the commodity known as kiln-dried corn was invented at the Brandywine Mills: two hundred bushels would be dried per day on brick floors, and be thought a large amount, though the "pan-kiln" now in use dries two thousand in the same time.”
Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 11, No. 25, April, 1873
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘kiln’.
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Beer and Brewing
Words about beer and the making of it.
airlock, bung, carboy, diversol, hops, mashtun, beer, sparge, trub, wort, malt, malt liquor and 184 more...
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art & art historical
chiaroscuro, architrave, column, capital, corinthian, dorice, entablature, frieze, ionic, sketch, abecedarian, abstraction and 124 more...
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Surprising four-letter words
I imagine most of these will be Anglo-Saxon, not likely to crop up in the average day's conversation, and thus excellent for Scrabble. ("most" is too common, likewise "will" and even "crop", in an...
blet, quim, clit, buff, sire, wiki, blog, loam, waft, heft, mare, lilt and 68 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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Really Cool Four-Letter Words
I marvel at the amazing variety of four-letter words in the English language. And that's not even counting really common (to me) words like fuck.
ibis, pelf, sofa, iota, oboe, lava, icon, sped, puha, pulp, puma, kyat and 150 more...
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Life is just a four-letter word
Everyone's got their favorites. Here are some of mine.
snit, hobo, minx, kiln, loll, pelf, yegg, ugly, bumf, brio, biro, haha and 92 more...
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Malachi_Constant's Words
triumverate, pandemic, parsnip, delineate, zamboni, parka, laser, swoop, malevolent, benevolent, fracas, tipsy and 372 more...
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Airborn
Words and phrases from Kenneth Oppel's book, Airborn.
running lights, starboard, bow, gondola, bullhorn, rudder man, gas cell, keel, catwalk, stern, cargo bay, machinist and 152 more...
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Professional Scrabble Lexicon (TWL)
A myriad of game-changing words every Scrabble addict must have in his arsenal.
Keep in mind that these are all tried-and-true feasibly playable words selected for their handiness, i.e...paragon, pignora, ganef, suttee, origan, ohia, aioli, abasement, lehr, mho, tallow, harelike and 848 more...
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the omnibus
preponderance, idioglossia, acumen, heteronym, flux, anacoluthon, metonymy, impetus, constellation, exegesis, revelatory, cloistered and 877 more...
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Damieng's Words
lupine, sapor, boz imp, imp, ovine, saracen, haberdashery, tiebar, shill, cutler, cutaway, lucite and 218 more...
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5-0
Hecko, words! I’m so happy I’ve found you. I want to keep you all and never want to lose you again. I hope you like it here.
amscray, thistledown, tine, tinsel, pungent, snarl, wail, lanky, viscid, dawdle, luminous, stow and 2719 more...
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cooked words
cook, cuisine, kitchen, quittor, apricot, precocious, biscotto, biscuit, charcuterie, concoct, decoct, ricotta and 89 more...
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big book gre
abase, abbess, abbey, abbot, abdicate, abdomen, abdominal, abduction, abed, aberration, abet, abeyance and 6691 more...
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miscellanea
antimacassar, snootful, sessile, glagolitic, marrowsky, farrago, keel, calumny, rheum, talisman, tally, awry and 508 more...
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Rocketeer's Words
defenestrate, shutterbug, antique, periscope, dogma, peculiar, eccentric, banana, apple, pear, cherry, photograph and 189 more...
Tweets
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