Word.ws English Dictionary

vegetaline

vegetaline noun: a substitute for ivory, etc., made by treating woody fibre with sulphuric acid, mixing with various ingredients, and pressing into any required form.

Noun

vegetaline (uncountable)

  1. (dated) A substitute for ivory, etc., made by treating woody fibre with sulphuric acid, mixing with various ingredients, and pressing into any required form.
    • It is called vegetaline, and it is nothing else than the oil extracted from copra (dried cocoanut), refined, and with all smell and taste neutralised by a patented process.1901 November 22, The Agricultural Journal and Mining Record, volume 4, number 19, page 587
    • Since the warm solns. of Na soaps form gels upon cooling, even in diln. of 1:400, only K soaps can be used, best made from vegetaline, a com. form of coconut oil.1915, “Vegetaline as basis for surgical liquid soaps”, in Chemical Abstracts, volume 9, number 3, page 3328

Origin of vegetaline

From vegetal + -ine.

Questions about vegetaline

What does vegetaline mean?
Vegetaline means a substitute for ivory, etc., made by treating woody fibre with sulphuric acid, mixing with various ingredients, and pressing into any required form.
What part of speech is vegetaline?
Vegetaline is a noun.

Words near vegetaline in the dictionary

  1. vegetably
  2. vegetal
  3. vegetal parchment
  4. vegetal pole
  5. vegetal poles
  6. vegetaline
  7. vegetalise
  8. vegetalised
  9. vegetalises
  10. vegetalising
  11. vegetality

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: vegetaline (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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