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Lead pencil   /lɛd pˈɛnsəl/   Listen
noun
Lead  n.  
1.
(Chem.) One of the elements, a heavy, pliable, inelastic metal, having a bright, bluish color, but easily tarnished. It is both malleable and ductile, though with little tenacity, and is used for tubes, sheets, bullets, etc. Its specific gravity is 11.37. It is easily fusible (melting point 327.5° C), forms alloys with other metals, and is an ingredient of solder and type metal. Atomic number 82. Atomic weight, 207.2. Symbol Pb (L. Plumbum). It is chiefly obtained from the mineral galena, lead sulphide.
2.
An article made of lead or an alloy of lead; as:
(a)
A plummet or mass of lead, used in sounding at sea.
(b)
(Print.) A thin strip of type metal, used to separate lines of type in printing.
(c)
Sheets or plates of lead used as a covering for roofs; hence, pl., a roof covered with lead sheets or terne plates. "I would have the tower two stories, and goodly leads upon the top."
3.
A small cylinder of black lead or graphite, used in pencils.
Black lead, graphite or plumbago; so called from its leadlike appearance and streak. (Colloq.)
Coasting lead, a sounding lead intermediate in weight between a hand lead and deep-sea lead.
Deep-sea lead, the heaviest of sounding leads, used in water exceeding a hundred fathoms in depth.
Hand lead, a small lead use for sounding in shallow water.
Krems lead, Kremnitz lead, a pure variety of white lead, formed into tablets, and called also Krems white, or Kremnitz white, and Vienna white.
Lead arming, tallow put in the hollow of a sounding lead. See To arm the lead (below).
Lead colic. See under Colic.
Lead color, a deep bluish gray color, like tarnished lead.
Lead glance. (Min.) Same as Galena.
Lead line
(a)
(Med.) A dark line along the gums produced by a deposit of metallic lead, due to lead poisoning.
(b)
(Naut.) A sounding line.
Lead mill, a leaden polishing wheel, used by lapidaries.
Lead ocher (Min.), a massive sulphur-yellow oxide of lead. Same as Massicot.
Lead pencil, a pencil of which the marking material is graphite (black lead).
Lead plant (Bot.), a low leguminous plant, genus Amorpha (Amorpha canescens), found in the Northwestern United States, where its presence is supposed to indicate lead ore.
Lead tree.
(a)
(Bot.) A West Indian name for the tropical, leguminous tree, Leucaena glauca; probably so called from the glaucous color of the foliage.
(b)
(Chem.) Lead crystallized in arborescent forms from a solution of some lead salt, as by suspending a strip of zinc in lead acetate.
Mock lead, a miner's term for blende.
Red lead, a scarlet, crystalline, granular powder, consisting of minium when pure, but commonly containing several of the oxides of lead. It is used as a paint or cement and also as an ingredient of flint glass.
Red lead ore (Min.), crocoite.
Sugar of lead, acetate of lead.
To arm the lead, to fill the hollow in the bottom of a sounding lead with tallow in order to discover the nature of the bottom by the substances adhering.
To cast the lead, or To heave the lead, to cast the sounding lead for ascertaining the depth of water.
White lead, hydrated carbonate of lead, obtained as a white, amorphous powder, and much used as an ingredient of white paint.





Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48


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"Lead pencil" Quotes from Famous Books



... thinking about this, when the door opened, and a tall, intellectual-looking young man entered from the study that communicated with the library. He placed on the table the bunch of letters he had in his hand, and, drawing up a chair, opened a blank notebook that had, between the leaves, a lead pencil sharpened ...
— The Face And The Mask • Robert Barr
... interpreter. For half an hour we stood watching an old gardener fitting the soil with his spading hoe in the manner seen in Fig. 26, where the graves of his ancestors occupy a part of the land. Angleworms were extremely numerous, as large around as an ordinary lead pencil and, when not extended, two-thirds as long, decidedly greenish in color. Nearly every stroke of the spade exposed two to five of these worms but so far as we observed, and we watched the man closely, pulverizing the soil, he neither injured nor left ...
— Farmers of Forty Centuries - or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan • F. H. King
... or flowers, or anything of the kind that you admire, take the pattern of by placing them against a light of window glass, then lay a piece of white paper over them, and through the latter you will see the roses, &c. Now with a lead pencil take the pattern of the roses, &c., on the paper; when you have them all marked, cut then out with a scissors, so that you have a complete pattern of them. Now take a piece of glass, whatever size your pattern ...
— Young's Demonstrative Translation of Scientific Secrets • Daniel Young
... to the roots of her hair, for what she carried in her heart was too precious to tell, but she meant to be a poet. Even then, in the pocket of her calico dress lay a little book and a stubbed lead pencil, and in the book was already the beginning of her great epic. Her father had said the epic was a thing of the past, that in the future none would be written, for that it was a form of expressions that belonged to the world's youth, and that ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... a letter from him, here," she went on. "The last one I have had. It is dated three months ago. It is not very long." She held up a half sheet of paper, written over on one side with a lead pencil; but she did not offer to let the officer ...
— Anting-Anting Stories - And other Strange Tales of the Filipinos • Sargent Kayme


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