smalt
/smɔːlt
/ /smɒlt /noun [mass noun] chiefly historical
1Glass coloured blue with cobalt oxide.The blue colour of smalt derives from the addition of cobalt oxide to a potash glass melt during manufacture....
- By that time also artificial blues had been discovered, smalt or cobalt blue which is cobalt aluminate in the 17th century, and then the famous Prussian blue, in 1704.
- One pertinent example was an advertisement in the New-York Gazette in 1748 for blue smalt, just in from London.
1.1A pigment made by pulverizing smalt glass.Eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century texts on smalt were also unhelpful, generally failing to describe how to apply it to large vertical surfaces....
- He took a sample about one-half-inch square that went right down to the bare wood for perusal in the laboratory and discovered that what we had was smalt.
- In the meantime, the only room that we know of here or in England completely treated with smalt is the Warner House's parlor bedchamber.
Origin
Mid 16th century: from French, from Italian smalto, of Germanic origin; related to smelt1.