Crossword clues for bitumen
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Bitumen \Bi*tu"men\, n. [L. bitumen: cf. F. bitume. Cf. B['e]ton.]
Mineral pitch; a black, tarry substance, burning with a bright flame; Jew's pitch. It occurs as an abundant natural product in many places, as on the shores of the Dead and Caspian Seas. It is used in cements, in the construction of pavements, etc. See Asphalt.
By extension, any one of the natural hydrocarbons, including the hard, solid, brittle varieties called asphalt, the semisolid maltha and mineral tars, the oily petroleums, and even the light, volatile naphthas.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
mid-15c., from Latin bitumen "asphalt," probably, via Oscan or Umbrian, from Celtic *betu- "birch, birch resin" (compare Gaulish betulla "birch," used by Pliny for the tree supposedly the source of bitumen).
Wiktionary
n. 1 Mineral pitch; a black, tarry substance, burning with a bright flame; Jew's pitch. It occurs as an abundant natural product in many places, as on the shores of the Dead and Caspian Seas. It is used in cements, in the construction of pavements, ''etc.'' 2 By extension, any one of the natural hydrocarbons, including the hard, solid, brittle varieties called asphalt, the semisolid maltha and mineral tars, the oily petrolea, and even the light, volatile naphthas. 3 (Canadian English) Canadian deposits of extremely heavy crude oil
WordNet
n. any of various naturally occurring impure mixtures of hydrocarbons
Usage examples of "bitumen".
Just where the bitumen ended and the grass began sat a small Aboriginal boy, I recognised him as belonging to a house around the corner from us!
Nothing execrable was wanting, neither military scenes full of little leaden soldiers, nor wan antiquity, nor the middle ages, smeared, as it were, with bitumen.
The museum comprehended an infinite number of medals, coins, urns, utensils, seals, cameos, intaglios, precious stones, vessels of agate and jasper, crystals, spars, fossils, metals, minerals, ore, earths, sands, salts, bitumens, sulphurs, ambergrise, talcs, mirre, testacea, corals, sponges, echini, echenites, asteri, trochi, crustatia, stellae marine, fishes, birds, eggs and nests, vipers, serpents, quadrupeds, insects, human calculi, anatomical preparations, seeds, gums, roots, dried plants, pictures, drawings, and mathematical instruments.
I can tell you we rub Nux with a mixture of bitumen, olive oil and usually hellebore.
These glazed brick or tiles, with figured designs, were fixed upon the walls, arches, and archivolts by bitumen mortar, and made up the first mosaics of which we have record.
To go to Paris, however, was hardly more attractive than to remain at Havre, for Bernard had a lively vision of the heated bitumen and the glaring frontages of the French capital.
He found that bistre and bitumen, which most painters were abandoning, made his colouring ripe and mellow.
Clumps of dried air-weed and red kelp were encrusted across the bitumened plates of the pontoon, shrivelled and burnt by the sun before they could reach the railing around the laboratory, while a dense refuse-filled mass of sargassum and spirogyra cushioned their impact as they reached the narrow jetty, oozing and subsiding like an immense soggy raft.
Or into the Hibernia of Abdul, where those seventy-two sages have reconstructed the speech of Adam, putting all languages together, just as you mix water and clay, pitch and bitumen?
The thick, sweet-smelling masses, bitumen brown in the shadows, corruscated like golden filaments in the light.
Witches, Ruta Skadi's clan, and Reina Miti's, and half a dozen others, every single witch carrying a torch of flaring pitch pine dipped in bitumen, were streaming over the fortress from the east, from the last of the clear sky, and flying straight toward the storm.
The modern EB suggests addition of small amounts of lime, portland cement, pozzolana, or bitumen to the top eight to twenty inches of the ground.