Other forms: metals
Metal is the hard shiny material that coins, keys and knives are made of. Cold to the touch, and it rings when you drop it.
Iron, copper, gold and aluminium are all metals, and mixing them gives you an alloy, which is how bronze and steel are made. The word works as a mass noun and as a count noun, so you can talk about metal generally or about the heavy metals specifically. Music took the name for heavy metal in the 1970s. Keep it apart from mettle, a different word entirely, which means courage.
1nounmetalA hard, shiny material that conducts heat and electricity.
“The handle is cold metal.”
Middle English
metal
English, today
metal
From Middle English metal. From Middle English metal, a borrowing from Old French metal, from Latin metallum (“metal, mine, quarry, mineral”), itself a borrowing from Ancient Greek μέταλλον (“mine, quarry, metal”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA