Other forms: ores
Ore is rock with enough metal locked inside it to be worth digging out. The rust-red lumps of iron ore going up a conveyor belt, the crushed grey stone leaving a copper mine by the trainload.
It names the raw stage only: ore comes out of the ground, gets crushed and smelted, and only then is it metal. The metal goes in front of it almost every time — iron ore, copper ore, uranium ore. It is uncountable in ordinary use, so you speak of a lot of ore rather than many ores; geologists say ores when they are comparing types. Ore grade means how rich the rock is, and low-grade ore can be too poor to bother with. Do not mix it up with oar, the pole you row with, or with the word or.
1nounoreRock or earth holding enough metal to make mining it worthwhile.
“The ship was loaded with iron ore.”
ore is a rock.
Two Old English words melted into one here. ōra meant ore, unwrought metal; ār meant brass, copper and bronze; and Middle English or came out of the blend. The ār half runs back through Proto-Germanic *aiz to Proto-Indo-European *áyos, whose other children include Latin aes, bronze, and Sanskrit ayas, copper and iron.
Proto-Indo-European
*áyos
Proto-Germanic
*aiz
Proto-West Germanic
*aiʀ
Old English
ōra — ore, unwrought metal
Middle English
or
English, today
ore
Built from
From Middle English or, oor, blend of Old English ōra (“ore, unwrought metal”) and ār (“brass, copper, bronze”), the first a derivate of ear (“earth”), the second from Proto-West Germanic aiʀ, from Proto-Germanic aiz, from Proto-Indo-European áyos. Compare Old Norse eir (“brass, copper”), German ehern (“of metal, of iron”), Gothic 𐌰𐌹𐌶 (“ore”); also Dutch oer (“ferrous hardpan; bog iron ore”). Compare Latin aes (“bronze, copper”), ae 𐬀𐬌𐬌𐬀𐬵, Sanskrit अयस् (“copper, iron”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA