Other forms: plastics
Plastic is the light man-made stuff almost everything is wrapped in. Bottles, bags, chairs, phone cases, the lid on a coffee cup. It goes into the machine soft, comes out hard, and outlasts by centuries the thing it was made for.
It works as an adjective without changing shape — a plastic bag, a plastic spoon — and English has grown a small vocabulary around the mess it makes: plastic waste, single-use plastic, microplastics in the sea. There is an older technical sense of easily shaped, and that is where plastic surgery comes from: nothing fake about it, the surgeon is reshaping. Say a smile is plastic, though, and you mean it is put on for show, the same insult behind plastic food and plastic scenery. And paying by plastic means paying by card.
1nounplasticA light man-made material, moulded while soft and set hard.~45%
“The chairs in the garden are made of plastic.”
2adjectiveadjMade of that material.~36%
“He drank from a plastic cup.”
3adjectiveartificialArtificial, put on for show.~2%
“He gave the camera a plastic smile.”
4adjectiveeasilyEasily shaped or moulded — the older, technical sense.~17%
“Clay is plastic while it is wet and hard once it has been fired.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 162 sentences found in the wild and placed 152 of them on a sense (10 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Ancient Greek πλάσσω meant to mould, to form, and Latin made it plasticus, of moulding. So the word began as a description of what you can do to a thing rather than the thing itself. That first meaning is still at work in plastic surgery, where nothing is artificial and the surgeon is simply shaping.
Latin
plasticus
English, today
plastic
Built from
From Latin plasticus. From Latin plasticus (“of molding”), from Ancient Greek πλαστικός, from πλάσσω (“to mold, form”). a doublet of plastique.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA