Word.ws English Dictionary

xylanthrax

xylanthrax noun: wood coal or charcoal, distinguished from mineral coal; lignite.

Noun

xylanthrax (uncountable)

  1. (archaic) Wood coal or charcoal, distinguished from mineral coal; lignite.
    • This clay formation, entirely unconnected with that of the Mississippi, and the lower part of the Arkansa, is of a blueish-grey, abounding in pyrites and xylanthrax, and is the active seat of those pseudo-volcanoes and their remains existing in the upper part of the Missouri territory.1821, Journal of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia: Volume 2, page 24
    • There are two beads of much interest: a small cylindrical one of chrysoprase, and a large one turned out of a piece of xylanthrax, similar to that met with at Bovy, Devonshire.1863, The journal of the British Archaeological Association: Volume 19, page 321

Origin of xylanthrax

Pseudo-loan from Ancient Greek, derived from ξυλο- (xulo-, “wooden”) + ἄνθραξ (ánthrax, “coal”).

Questions about xylanthrax

What does xylanthrax mean?
Xylanthrax means wood coal or charcoal, distinguished from mineral coal; lignite.
What part of speech is xylanthrax?
Xylanthrax is a noun.

Words near xylanthrax in the dictionary

  1. xylanohydrolase
  2. xylanohydrolases
  3. xylanolysis
  4. xylanolytic
  5. xylans
  6. xylanthrax
  7. xylarate
  8. xylarates
  9. xylaria
  10. xylariaceous
  11. xylarialean

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: xylanthrax (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.

Last updated:

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