Other forms: porcelains
Porcelain is the fine white ceramic that good cups and plates are made of — thin, hard, and pale enough that a hand held behind it shows through. The bathroom sink, a museum vase, the little figurines on a grandmother's shelf.
It is fired far hotter than ordinary pottery, which is why it comes out so hard and so thin, and why it chips rather than crumbles. In everyday English people call the cups and plates 'china'; porcelain is the word for the material itself and for serious objects — Meissen porcelain, a porcelain collection. It works as an adjective too: a porcelain doll, a porcelain crown at the dentist, and figuratively 'a porcelain complexion' for skin that is very pale and smooth. Say it POR-suh-lin; the ending is not 'lane'. Earthenware and stoneware are its cheaper relatives, thicker and never see-through.
1nounporcelainA hard, fine, white ceramic thin enough for light to pass through.
“The cup was thin porcelain, almost see-through.”
synonyms: china
2adjectivepaleMade of porcelain, or pale and delicate like it.
“A porcelain figure of a shepherdess stood on the mantelpiece.”
porcelain is a ceramic.
Porcelain is named after a shell, and the shell was named after a piglet. Middle French porcelaine meant both cowrie shells and chinaware, and it came from Italian porcellana, from porcello, 'piglet'; the glossy white material was called after the shiny back of the cowrie. Why anyone looked at a cowrie and thought of a small pig has never been settled.
Italian
porcello — piglet
roa-oit
porcellana — cowrie; china, chinaware
Middle French
porcelaine — cowrie, wampum; china, chinaware
English, today
porcelain
Middle French porcelaine (“cowrie, wampum; china, chinaware”), from roa-oit porcellana (“cowrie; china, chinaware”), from Italian porcello (“piglet”). The material was so called because of its resemblance to the shell of the cowrie. Why the cowrie was named with a word meaning “piglet” is unclear.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in A Man Called Ove, Materials & Substances, Antiques & Collecting
First appears in chapter 39 of A Man Called Ove.
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