Other forms: smelting, smelted, smelts
To smelt is to melt ore in order to get the metal out. Smelt iron, a smelting works, smelted copper.
It is not just melting: the ore is heated with a reducing agent — charcoal or coke — which strips the oxygen away and leaves the metal. That step is what made the Bronze and Iron Ages possible. A smelter is both the works and the person. Note that smelt is also a small silvery fish, and the past tense of smell in British English, so the letters do three jobs.
1verbsmeltTo melt ore in order to get the metal out.
“In the Iron Age, people smelted iron ore in small clay furnaces.”
2nounsmallA small silvery fish.
“The smelt runs to roughly twenty centimetres.”
smelt is a metal extraction, or a fish.
Old English smelt is Germanic, related to melt. Enamel comes from the same root, which is why it means something melted onto metal.
Middle English
smelt
English, today
smelt
From Middle English smelt. From Middle English smelt, from Old English smelt, from Proto-West Germanic smelt, from Proto-Germanic smeltaz.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in Rocks & Minerals