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carbon oil

noun

Etymology

From carbon + oil. Coined in the early 1850s in Pennsylvania by Samuel Martin Kier, an American industrialist who refined crude petroleum into an illuminant. Kier chose a marketable name for his new lamp fuel to emphasize both its petroleum origin and its difference from whale oil. According to linguist Hans Kurath, this term may be heard from the western edge of the Alleghenies to beyond the Ohio line.

  1. derived from ἔλαιον — “olive oil”
  2. derived from oleum — “oil, olive oil”
  3. derived from olie
  4. inherited from oyle
  5. compounded as carbon oil — “carbon + oil”

Definitions

  1. Alternative letter-case form of Carbon Oil.

  2. Distilled petroleum used as lamp oil

    Distilled petroleum used as lamp oil; early kerosene.

    • ... lands near Tarentum, east of Pittsburgh, along the Allegheny River ... The region was also notorious for the pernicious infiltration of petroleum, called at the time Carbon Oil, which was a popular rather than scientific term.

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

No curated loop yet for carbon oil. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA