Word.ws English Dictionary

vitrain

vitrain noun: a constituent of banded bituminous coal consisting of a horizontal glossy band of friable material.

vitrain: a constituent of banded bituminous coal consisting of a horizontal glossy band of friable material
Image: CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

vitrain (countable and uncountable, plural vitrains)

  1. A constituent of banded bituminous coal consisting of a horizontal glossy band of friable material.
    • The caking behaviour of vitrain and clarain could be improved after the coal has been picked out.1996, T.S. Golosinski, Guo Yuguang, Mining Science and Technology 1996, →ISBN, page 396
    • In order to measure relatively accurately the activation energy of coal, and to exclude the disturbance from coal samples, the hand-picked banded vitrains in bright coal are adopted as experimental samples (Table 1).1997, Yang Qi, Geology of Fossil Fuels: Coal, →ISBN, page 149

Forms of vitrain

pluralvitrains

Origin of vitrain

From Latin vitreus (“vitreous”) + -ain in fusain; compare French -ain (“-ane”). Coined by British birth control campaigner and paleontologist Marie Stopes in 1918.

Questions about vitrain

What does vitrain mean?
Vitrain means a constituent of banded bituminous coal consisting of a horizontal glossy band of friable material.
What part of speech is vitrain?
Vitrain is a noun.
What is the plural of vitrain?
The plural of vitrain is vitrains.

Words near vitrain in the dictionary

  1. vitrail
  2. vitrailed
  3. vitraillist
  4. vitraillists
  5. vitrails
  6. vitrain
  7. vitrains
  8. vitrand
  9. vitrandosol
  10. vitrandosols
  11. vitrands

Source and license

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