Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A very hard, fine-grained quartz that sparks when struck with steel.
  • noun A piece of flint used to produce a spark.
  • noun A small solid cylinder of a spark-producing alloy, used in lighters to ignite the fuel.
  • noun A piece of flint used as a tool by prehistoric humans.
  • noun Something resembling flint in hardness.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A form of silica, somewhat allied to chalcedony, but more opaque, and with less luster.
  • noun A piece of flinty stone used for any purpose, as for striking fire in a flint-lock musket or otherwise, or in the form of an implement. See cut under flint-lock.
  • noun Figuratively, something very hard or obdurate: as, he was flint against persuasion.
  • Made or composed of flint.
  • Hard and firm, as if made of flint: as, flint corn or flint wheat.
  • noun Sheepskin dried in the sun.
  • noun An abbreviation of flint-glass.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun (Min.) A massive, somewhat impure variety of quartz, in color usually of a gray to brown or nearly black, breaking with a conchoidal fracture and sharp edge. It is very hard, and strikes fire with steel.
  • noun A piece of flint for striking fire; -- formerly much used, esp. in the hammers of gun locks.
  • noun Anything extremely hard, unimpressible, and unyielding, like flint.
  • noun (Geol.) Same as Stone age, under Stone.
  • noun a fire made principially of powdered silex.
  • noun See in the Vocabulary.
  • noun (Archæol.) tools, etc., employed by men before the use of metals, such as axes, arrows, spears, knives, wedges, etc., which were commonly made of flint, but also of granite, jade, jasper, and other hard stones.
  • noun (Pottery), (Mining) An obsolete appliance for lighting the miner at his work, in which flints on a revolving wheel were made to produce a shower of sparks, which gave light, but did not inflame the fire damp.
  • noun a hard, siliceous stone; a flint.
  • noun a kind of wall, common in England, on the face of which are exposed the black surfaces of broken flints set in the mortar, with quions of masonry.
  • noun a solution of silica, or flints, in potash.
  • noun [Colloq.] to be capable of, or guilty of, any expedient or any meanness for making money.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A hard, fine-grained quartz that fractures conchoidally and generates sparks when struck.
  • noun A piece of flint, such as a gunflint, used to produce a spark.
  • noun A small cylinder of some other material of the same function in a cigarette lighter, etc.
  • verb transitive To furnish or decorate an object with flint.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a city in southeast central Michigan near Detroit; automobile manufacturing
  • adjective showing unfeeling resistance to tender feelings
  • noun a hard kind of stone; a form of silica more opaque than chalcedony
  • noun a river in western Georgia that flows generally south to join the Chattahoochee River at the Florida border where they form the Apalachicola River

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English, from Old English.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Old English flint, from Proto-Germanic *flintaz (compare Middle Dutch vlint, Old High German flins, Danish flint), from Proto-Indo-European *splind- (“to split, cleave”) (compare Irish slinn ("slate, shingle"), Ancient Greek πλίνθος (plinthos)), from *(s)plei- (“to split”). More at split.

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Examples

  • The Jews seem to have performed the rite of circumcision with flint implements, for we read in Exodus that Zipporah, the wife of Moses, took a sharp stone for that purpose; and the phrase translated "sharp knives" in Joshua v. 2 -- "At that time the Lord said unto Joshua, Make thee sharp knives, and circumcise again the children of Israel the second time" -- should be translated, as in the marginal reference, _knives of flint_.

    Roman Mosaics Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood Hugh Macmillan

  • The benifit of the flint is that it will throw a shower of sparks even when it is soaking wet, and for the little bit of room it takes up, there's no sense in leaving it.

    Is flint better to start a fire than waterproof matches. 2009

  • Worst line: “Here are me, Brian, Tom, Jim and Gregg outside our house in flint Michigan.”

    2009 February 07 « One-Minute Book Reviews 2009

  • The benifit of the flint is that it will throw a shower of sparks even when it is soaking wet, and for the little bit of room it takes up, there's no sense in leaving it.

    Is flint better to start a fire than waterproof matches. 2009

  • Yes | No | Report from buckshot89 wrote 49 weeks 5 days ago oh yeah. most of my guns have names. you have to take care of them like a child. most of my reenacting buddies have named their flint lockes based on their style. germanic: gretchin, and i have the oldest gun in the group and everyone referes to her as old dirty bas%$#$. quite an endearing name.

    Do you name your guns? 2009

  • Yes | No | Report from buckshot89 wrote 49 weeks 5 days ago oh yeah. most of my guns have names. you have to take care of them like a child. most of my reenacting buddies have named their flint lockes based on their style. germanic: gretchin, and i have the oldest gun in the group and everyone referes to her as old dirty bas%$#$. quite an endearing name.

    Do you name your guns? 2009

  • I saw on an episode of Danial Boone that he called his flint lock "Tit Licker"!

    Do you name your guns? 2009

  • I saw on an episode of Danial Boone that he called his flint lock "Tit Licker"!

    Do you name your guns? 2009

  • When Croder and I made contact with each other we both had to keep our cool: we shared what some people called a flint -- and -- tinder complex.

    Quiller Meridian Hall, Adam 1993

  • The muskets of the day were the heavy weapons known as flint-locks.

    The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book Ontario. Ministry of Education

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