goldbeater's skin
goldbeater's skin noun: the outer membrane of the caecum in a cattle.
Noun
goldbeater's skin (countable and uncountable, plural goldbeater's skins)
- The outer membrane of the caecum in a cattle.
- The Comstock laws that forbade the importation of contraceptives were never enforced against goldbeater's skins or their molds, so that throughout the decades when the laws against reproductive control were most stringently enforced a constant supply of materials ready to be turned into condoms was...1997, Janet Farrell Brodie, Contraception and Abortion in Nineteenth-century America, →ISBN, page 208
- The membrane had been used, perhaps since antiquity, to make gold leaf, which goldbeaters produced by starting out with a small ingot of gold and beating it thinner, then sandwiching the leaves between sheets of cow intestines, ultimately creating a stack of alternating goldbeater's skins and gold...2015, Ed Regis, Monsters: The Hindenburg Disaster and the Birth of Pathological Technology, →ISBN
- Synonyms:
- gold skin
Synonyms of goldbeater's skin
Forms of goldbeater's skin
| plural | goldbeater's skins |
|---|
Origin of goldbeater's skin
From the use of cow intestines as a separator in the manufacture of gold leaf.
Questions about goldbeater's skin
- What does goldbeater's skin mean?
- Goldbeater's skin means the outer membrane of the caecum in a cattle.
- What part of speech is goldbeater's skin?
- Goldbeater's skin is a noun.
- What is the plural of goldbeater's skin?
- The plural of goldbeater's skin is goldbeater's skins.
Words near goldbeater's skin in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: goldbeater's skin (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “goldbeater's skin.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/goldbeater%27s_skin. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.