Ceramic

This article is about the material properties of ceramics. For other uses, see Ceramic (disambiguation).
Short timeline of ceramic in different styles

A ceramic is any of the various hard, brittle, heat-resistant, and corrosion-resistant materials made by shaping and then firing an inorganic, nonmetallic material, such as clay, at a high temperature.[1][2] Common examples are earthenware, porcelain, and brick.

The earliest ceramics made by humans were fired clay bricks used for building house walls and other structures. Other pottery objects such as pots, vessels, vases and figurines were made from clay, either by itself or mixed with other materials like silica, hardened by sintering in fire. Later, ceramics were glazed and fired to create smooth, colored surfaces, decreasing porosity through the use of glassy, amorphous ceramic coatings on top of the crystalline ceramic substrates.[3] Ceramics now include domestic, industrial, and building products, as well as a wide range of materials developed for use in advanced ceramic engineering, such as semiconductors.

The word ceramic comes from the Ancient Greek word κεραμικός (keramikós), meaning "of or for pottery"[4] (from κέραμος (kéramos) 'potter's clay, tile, pottery').[5] The earliest known mention of the root ceram- is the Mycenaean Greek ke-ra-me-we, workers of ceramic, written in Linear B syllabic script.[6] The word ceramic can be used as an adjective to describe a material, product, or process, or it may be used as a noun, either singular or, more commonly, as the plural noun ceramics.[7]

  1. ^ Heimann, Robert B. (16 April 2010). Classic and Advanced Ceramics: From Fundamentals to Applications, Preface. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 9783527630189. Archived from the original on 10 December 2020. Retrieved 30 October 2020.
  2. ^ "ceramic". The Free Dictionary. Archived from the original on 2020-08-03. Retrieved 2020-08-03.
  3. ^ Carter, C. B.; Norton, M. G. (2007). Ceramic materials: Science and engineering. Springer. pp. 20, 21. ISBN 978-0-387-46271-4.
  4. ^ keramiko/s. Liddell, Henry George; Scott, Robert; A Greek–English Lexicon at the Perseus Project
  5. ^ ke/ramos. Liddell, Henry George; Scott, Robert; A Greek–English Lexicon at the Perseus Project
  6. ^ "keramewe". Palaeolexicon. Archived from the original on 2011-05-01.
  7. ^ "ceramic". Oxford English Dictionary (Online ed.). Oxford University Press. (Subscription or participating institution membership required.)