Wort des Tages
7 June 2026
almond furnace
A kind of furnace used in refining to separate the metal from cinders and other foreign matter.
Warum dieses Wort
Nothing to do with nuts: the name is usually explained as a corruption of Almain, the old English word for German, marking where the design came from. It survives mainly in old dictionaries and smelting treatises.
In use
The old accounts at the works list an almond furnace for the sweepings, so someone was recovering silver out of the cinder here.
Written by our editors to show how the term is used, not a recorded quotation.