Word.ws English Dictionary

open-hearth

open-hearth adjective: describing a reverberatory furnace used to make steel, usually in mass-produced quantities.

Adjective

open-hearth (not comparable)

  1. Describing a reverberatory furnace used to make steel, usually in mass-produced quantities.
    • a then-new steel mill with three large open-hearth furnaces
  2. Designating the steel so produced.
    • Early open-hearth steels, beating crucible steels on price but often unable to match their quality, were nonetheless well suited to many applications where extreme strength was superfluous but low cost was essential.
  3. Describing an open hearth in the home, especially in premodern centuries when such hearths were more common.
    • the little tricks of open-hearth cooking that she had nearly forgotten after years behind a coal range

Forms of open-hearth

alternative formopen hearth

Words formed from open-hearth

  • open-hearth furnace
  • open-hearth process

Questions about open-hearth

What does open-hearth mean?
Open-hearth means describing a reverberatory furnace used to make steel, usually in mass-produced quantities.
What part of speech is open-hearth?
Open-hearth is an adjective.

Words near open-hearth in the dictionary

  1. open-heart surgeries
  2. open-heart surgery
  3. open-hearted
  4. open-heartedly
  5. open-heartedness
  6. open-hearth
  7. open-kneed
  8. open-kneed breeches
  9. open-loop
  10. open-mid
  11. open-minded

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: open-hearth (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: “open-hearth.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/open-hearth. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.