Carbon
Pronunciation
- Rhymes: -É‘Ë(ɹ)bÉ™n
Origin
From French carbone, coined by Lavoisier, from Latin carbÅ ("charcoal, coal"), from Proto-Indo-European *ker- ("to burn"), see also Old English heorþ ("hearth"), Old Norse hyrr ("fire"), Gothic ðŒ·ðŒ°ðŒ¿ð‚ðŒ¹ ("coal"), Old High German harsta ("roasting"), Russian церен ("brazier"), Old Church Slavonic крада ("hearth, fireplace"), Lithuanian kuriu ("to heat"), karstas ("hot") and krosnis ("oven"), Sanskrit कृषà¥à¤£ ("burnt, black") and कूडयति ("singes"), Latin cremare ("to burn").
Noun
carbon
(countable and uncountable; plural carbons)- (uncountable) The chemical element (symbol C) with an atomic number of 6.
- (countable, informal) A sheet of carbon paper.
- 1939, Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep, Penguin 2011, p. 51:He stepped back and opened his bag and took out a printed pad of D.O.A. forms and began to write over a carbon.
- (countable, informal) A carbon copy.
- A fossil fuel that is made of impure carbon such as coal or charcoal.
- (ecology, uncountable) Carbon dioxide, in the context of global warming and climate change.
- 2014-04-25, Martin Lukacs, Canada becoming launch-pad of a global tar sands and oil shale frenzy, If Alberta’s reserves are a carbon bomb, this global expansion of tar sands and oil shale exploitation amounts to an escalating emissions arms race, the unlocking of a subterranean cache of weapons of mass ecological destruction.