Ironmaking

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The industrial process of producing iron from its ores by extracting and refining it using heat and chemical reactions ; the set of methods and techniques employed to convert raw iron ore into usable metal ; the metallurgical crafting of iron through smelting and purification steps to obtain iron for manufacturing
2. The procedure of transforming iron ore into iron through melting and chemical treatment ; the technology and operations involved in extracting and preparing iron metal from mineral sources ; the systematic production of iron involving thermal reduction and refining to produce usable iron material
3. The complex series of actions to derive iron metal from natural ores through heating and chemical alteration ; the engineering discipline focused on converting raw ore into iron using furnaces and additives ; the manufacturing technique that extracts and processes iron to yield a usable industrial metal product

Etymology: Ironmaking is about as plain as compounds get: it joins "iron" with "making," the gerund-style noun meaning the act or business of producing something. The Old English root "iren" has been in the language since before the Norman period, and "making" comes from the Old English "macian," so the combined term describes exactly what it sounds like, the trade of turning ore into metal. The more interesting part is how the process itself has been reshaped by the sense of "making." Ironmaking once meant small-scale working of bloomery furnaces, where ore was reduced to a spongy mass of iron and hammered free of slag by hand. Later it came to mean the blast furnace system, in which molten pig iron is produced in bulk and then refined into steel, so the same two-word compound now covers an industrial chain rather than a single craft.

Synonyms: iron production, smelting, metallurgy