Other forms: opals
An opal is a stone that flashes with shifting colours. A black opal, opal earrings, the opal caught the light.
The flashing is not pigment at all — the stone is packed with microscopic spheres of silica that split light like a diffraction grating, so the colours come from structure. Australia produces most of them. The superstition that they bring bad luck came from a novel.
1nounopalA stone that flashes with shifting colours.
“Her ring had a large opal that shone blue, green and pink in the light.”
opal is a gemstone.
Latin opalus comes through Greek from Sanskrit upala, a stone or gem.
Sanskrit
उपल — gem, stone
Medieval Greek
ὀπάλλιος
Latin
opalus
French
opale
English, today
opal
Built from
In Florio’s A World of Words 1598 as opale, from French opale, from Latin opalus, from Medieval Greek ὀπάλλιος, from Sanskrit उपल (“gem, stone”), from उपरि (“the upper millstone”). Distantly related to over.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA