Skip to content
ARCHIEENGLISH
LearnPlayWordsRanking
  • Learn
  • Play
  • Words
  • Ranking
  • Mine
← Vocabulary

slag

UK/ˈslæɡ/US/ˈslæɡ/
nounC1Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #9,366 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: slags

Slag is the waste left when metal is smelted from ore. A slag heap, molten slag, slag from the furnace.

It floats on the molten metal and is drawn off, and the heaps it left behind shaped the landscape of every coal and steel district. Slag is also a coarse British insult aimed at women, which is worth knowing about and not worth using.

Javier Rubilar from santiago, chile · CC BY-SA 2.0

Definitions of slag

  1. 1nounslagThe waste left when metal is smelted from ore.C1

    “The old ironworks left behind mountains of slag, which is now used to build roads.”

slag is a waste material.

Where it comes from

Middle Low German slagge meant dross from smelting, probably from a root meaning to strike.

  1. Proto-Germanic

    *slaggô

  2. Proto-West Germanic

    *slaggō

  3. Old Saxon

    *slaggo

  4. Middle Low German

    slagge

  5. English, today

    slag

Built from

  • slaggen · Middle Low German — slag, dross

Borrowed from Middle Low German slagge, slaggen (“slag, dross”), from Old Saxon slaggo, from Proto-West Germanic slaggō, from Proto-Germanic slaggô, from Proto-Germanic slagōną (“to strike”) + -gô. Compare slāgen (“to strike”), since originally the splinters struck off from the metal by hammering, from slagōn, from slagōn. Compare also Old Saxon slegi, from slagi. See also Dutch slak, German Schlacke, Swedish slagg; also compare English slay.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire

Practise this word

slag in the wild

  • The mix of slag and iron in the bloom, termed sponge iron, is usually consolidated and further forged into wrought iron.

    Bloomery

  • Spoil tips are not formed of slag, but in some areas, such as England and Wales, they are referred to as slag heaps and sometimes as pit heaps.

    Spoil tip

  • An example of the use of the electro-slag refined (ESR) steel technique is the L30 tank gun.

    Electro-slag remelting

  • CrNi60WTi is a stainless steel which is best formed by either electro-slag remelting or vacuum arc remelting.

    Electro-slag remelting

  • Iron ore was smelted in natural draft furnaces and molten slag was drained through shallow conduits to collecting pits forming huge slag blocks weighing up to 47 kg.

    Opi (archaeological site)

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.