Other forms: steels
Steel is the hard grey metal made from iron that most solid things are built out of — bridges, knives, railway lines, the frame inside a skyscraper. Cold under your hand, heavy, and it rings when you tap it.
It is uncountable: you buy steel, not a steel. Stainless steel is the kind that does not rust, the surface of a good kitchen sink; steelworks and steel mills are where it is made, and the whole business is the steel industry. In front of a noun it means made of steel — steel toecaps, a steel drum, a steel door. There is a verb as well: you steel yourself, meaning you make yourself hard before something you dread, steeling herself to open the letter. And nerves of steel means you do not flinch.
1nounsteelA hard, strong metal made from iron and carbon, used for building and for tools.~83%
“The bridge is built of steel and concrete.”
2adjectiveadjectiveMade of steel.~15%
“The boots have steel toecaps.”
3verbyourselfTo make yourself ready for something painful or frightening.~2%
“He steeled himself and knocked on the door.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 15 sentences found in the wild and placed 13 of them on a sense (2 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
steel is a metal made from iron.
Old English had stiele, from a Proto-West Germanic word meaning something made of steel. Further back sits a root meaning to be firm or rigid, and behind that a Proto-Indo-European word for standing fast. Steel is named for the one thing it does best: it does not give. German Stahl and Dutch staal are the same word.
Proto-Indo-European
*stak- — to stay, to be firm
Proto-Germanic
*stahlą
Proto-West Germanic
*stahlī — something made of steel
Old English
stīele
Middle English
stele
English, today
steel
Built from
From Middle English stele, stel, from Old English stīele, from Proto-West Germanic stahlī (“something made of steel”), enlargement of stahl (“steel”), from Proto-Germanic stahlą, from stah- or stag- (“to be firm, rigid”), from Proto-Indo-European stak- (“to stay, to be firm”). Compare Scots stele, yol stehli, German Stahl, Dutch staal, Danish, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk and Swedish stål.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA