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emery

nounverbattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈɛməɹi//

An impure type of corundum, often used for sanding or polishing.

noun

  1. 1

    An impure type of corundum, often used for sanding or polishing.

    It took me from nine to ten days to grind and polish it ready for parabolising and silvering. I did this by hand labour with the aid of emery, but without a lathe. I finally used rouge instead of emery in grinding down the glass, until I could see my face in the mirror quite plain.

Etymology

From French émeri, from Old French esmeril, from Italian smeriglio.

verb

  1. 1

    To sand or polish with emery.

  2. 2

    To coat with emery.

Forms

plural
emeries
past tense
emeried
past participle
emeried
present participle
emerying
third person singular
emeries
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).