ore

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

1. n. A mineral or an aggregate of minerals from which a valuable constituent, especially a metal, can be profitably mined or extracted.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. n. A metalliferous mineral of rock, especially one which is of sufficient value to be mined. A mixture of a native metal with rock or veinstone is not usually called ore, however, it being understood that in an ore proper the metal is in a mineralized condition — that is, exists in combination with some mineralizer, as sulphur or oxygen. The ore and veinstone together constitute the mass of the metalliferous deposit, vein or lode. The ore as mined is usually more or less mixed with veinstone, and from this it is separated, as completely as may be convenient or possible, by dressing. It then usually goes to the smelter, who, by means of a more or less complicated series of operations, frees it from the worthless material which still remains mechanically mixed with it, and also sets it free from its chemical combination with the substances by which it is mineralized.
2. n. Metal; sometimes, specifically, a precious metal, as gold.
3. n. See the qualifying words.
4. n. A Middle English form of oar.
5. n. Favor; grace; mercy; clemency; protection.
6. n. Honor; glory.
7. n. A seaweed, especially Fucus vesiculosus or Laminaria digitata. Compare ore-weed.
8. n. A kind of fine wool.
9. n. One of the walls which surround the hearth of a Catalan forge.
10. n. In the metallurgical treatment of the residue from burning off the sulphur of pyrites in the manufacture of sulphuric acid this material is mixed with common salt, roasted in a suitable furnace with free access of air, and, after cooling, leached with water to extract salts of copper. The dark-red oxid of iron which is left from the leaching is known as purple ore or blue billy. It is reduced to pulverulent metallic iron and used to precipitate copper from the solution obtained in the leaching.
11. n. Abbreviations of Oregon.

Wiktionary

1. n. Rock that contains utilitarian materials; primarily a rock containing metals or gems which -- at the time of the rock's evaluation and proposal for extraction -- are able to be separated from its neighboring minerals and processed at a cost that does not exceed those materials' present-day economic values.

GNU Webster's 1913

1. n. obsolete Honor; grace; favor; mercy; clemency; happy augury.
2. n. The native form of metal, whether free and uncombined, as gold, copper, etc., or combined, as iron, lead, etc. Usually the ores contain the metals combined with oxygen, sulphur, arsenic, etc. (called mineralizers).
3. n. (Mining) A native metal or its compound with the rock in which it occurs, after it has been picked over to throw out what is worthless.
4. n. rare Metal.

WordNet 3.0

1. n. a mineral that contains metal that is valuable enough to be mined
2. n. a monetary subunit in Denmark and Norway and Sweden; 100 ore equal 1 krona