smelt
Word family
Synonym discussion
Sense: verb/2
These five words all deal with obtaining or shaping materials, but each has a different range. 'Smelt' is the narrowest: it means heating ore or scrap metal to trigger a chemical reaction that separates pure metal from waste. 'Refine' is wider — it means removing impurities from any substance (oil, sugar, metal) through various methods, not necessarily heat. 'Extract' is the most general: pulling one thing out of another by any method, like squeezing juice from a lemon or mining coal from the ground. 'Melt' is purely physical: applying heat to turn a solid into a liquid with no chemical change, as when ice becomes water. 'Melt down' is an informal phrasal verb describing the melting of metal objects to reuse the material, like turning old silverware into ingots. A factory smelts iron ore, a sugar company refines raw sugar, a chemist extracts a compound from a plant, the sun melts snow, and a jeweller melts down old rings to make new ones.
Common collocations
Etymology
The verb 'smelt' (extract metal) entered English from Middle Dutch and Middle Low German 'smelten', meaning 'to melt', and is related to Old English 'meltan'. It has been used since around the 1500s. The fish 'smelt' comes from a separate Old English word 'smelt', which may be connected to 'smolt' (a young salmon) and possibly to a root meaning 'smooth' or 'shiny', describing the fish's silvery scales. The past tense 'smelt' of the verb 'smell' is a native English development: 'smell' had irregular forms as early as Old English. These three modern meanings share the same spelling by coincidence and are historically unrelated to one another.