kiln

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

1. 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.
2. v. To process in one of these ovens.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. 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hops, grain, lumber, etc., are strictly dry-houses or drying-rooms, though sometimes called kilns, Fruit-kilns are now superseded by evaporators.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. See brick.
2. To dry or burn in a kiln.

Wiktionary

1. 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.
2. v. To bake in a kiln.

GNU Webster's 1913

1. 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
2. n. A furnace for burning bricks; a brickkiln.

WordNet 3.0

1. n. a furnace for firing or burning or drying such things as porcelain or bricks