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oil shales

oil shales is the plural of oil shale.

Meaning of oil shale

Noun

oil shale (usually uncountable, plural oil shales)

  1. (usually) A sedimentary rock containing kerogen from which petroleum-like shale oil can be produced by pyrolysis, hydrogenation, or thermal dissolution.
    • Up in the mountains along both sides of Parachute Creek the Exxon Corporation and other companies have begun to pour billions of dollars into two huge projects to turn the nation's immense reserves of oil shale into shale oil.1981 November 6, Robert D. Hershey Jr, “Shale Oil Is Coming Of Age”, in The New York Times, →ISSN
    Synonyms:
    kerogen shale

Questions about oil shales

What is oil shales the plural of?
Oil shales is the plural of oil shale.

Words near oil shales in the dictionary

  1. oil rigs
  2. Oil Rivers
  3. oil sand
  4. oil sands
  5. oil shale
  6. oil shales
  7. oil slick
  8. oil slicks
  9. oil spill
  10. oil spills
  11. oil spot

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: oil shales (page history and authors); oil shale (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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