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magnet

nouncommon in dialogue

  • Australia//ˈmæɡ.nɪt//
  • Australia//ˈmæɡ.nət//
  • Australia/[ˈmæɡ.nət̚]/
  • //mæɡnɛʈ//

A piece of material that attracts some metals by magnetism.

noun

  1. 1

    A piece of material that attracts some metals by magnetism.

  2. 2

    figurativeAn alluring or attractive person or thing.

    He always had a girl on his arm – he's a bit of a babe magnet.

    Iron and coal were the magnets that drew railways to this land of lovely valleys and silent mountains—for such it was a century-and-a-half ago, before man blackened the valleys with the smoke of his forges, scarred the green hills with his shafts and waste-heaps, and drove the salmon from the quiet Rhondda and the murmuring Taff.

    Again, dude? Man, you just a MAGNET for trouble!

    […] I wanted to show Nick the largest of the water holes, Rigueik, that act as magnets to life in the dry season.

  3. 3

    Variant of magnet linkEllipsis of magnet link.

    Magnets are thus used to create a package of cryptologic information and bundling^([sic]) it together.

Etymology

Etymology tree Old French magnetebor. Pre-Greekbor.? Ancient Greek Μάγνης (Mágnēs) Ancient Greek μᾰ́γνης (mắgnēs)bor. Latin magnēsbor. Middle English magnete English magnet From Middle English magnete, via Old French magnete, Latin magnēs, magnētem (“lodestone”), from Ancient Greek μαγνῆτις [λίθος] (magnêtis [líthos], “Magnesian [stone]”), either after the Lydian city Magnesia ad Sipylum (modern-day Manisa, Turkey), or after the Greek region of Μαγνησία (Magnēsía) (whence came the colonists who founded the city in Lydia). Related to manganese, magnesia and magnesium.

Forms

plural
magnets
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).