Word.ws English Dictionary

kieselgur

kieselgur is the alternative spelling of kieselguhr.

Meaning of kieselguhr

Noun

kieselguhr (countable and uncountable, plural kieselguhrs)

  1. Diatomaceous earth, a kind of soft rock containing the remains of diatoms; it absorbs nitroglycerine and is used to manufacture dynamite.
    • It was the only name anybody seemed to know him by, “Kieselguhr” being a kind of fine clay, used to soak up nitroglycerine and stabilize it into dynamite.2006, Thomas Pynchon, “Iceland Spar”, in Against the Day, New York, N.Y.: Penguin Press, →ISBN, page 171

Forms of kieselgur

pluralkieselgurs

Questions about kieselgur

What is kieselgur the alternative spelling of?
Kieselgur is the alternative spelling of kieselguhr.

Words near kieselgur in the dictionary

  1. Kierz
  2. Kies
  3. Kieschnick
  4. kieselguhr
  5. kieselguhrs
  6. kieselgur
  7. kieselgurs
  8. Kieser
  9. kieserite
  10. kieserites
  11. kieseritic

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: kieselgur (page history and authors); kieselguhr (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.

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Cite this entry: “kieselgur.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/kieselgur. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.