Cobalt
name, noun ·Moderate ·College level
Definitions
- 1 A chemical element (symbol Co) with an atomic number of 27: a hard, lustrous, silver-gray metal. uncountable, usually
- 2 a hard ferromagnetic silver-white bivalent or trivalent metallic element; a trace element in plant and animal nutrition wordnet
- 3 Cobalt blue. uncountable, usually
"And although we’ve certainly seen a variety of blue shades — from periwinkle to cobalt and even Dean Cain’s indigo-washed costume from the 1990’s TV show “Lois & Clark” — Superman’s uniform is still instantly recognizable across generations. In fact, there is only one film — Zack Snyder’s 2013 “Man of Steel” — in which Superman does not wear his iconic red belted trunks."
- 1 A village in Connecticut.
- 2 A town in Ontario.
- 3 An unincorporated community in Idaho.
Example
More examples"Some of the cobalt used in phone and laptop batteries is dug out by hand in Congo."
Etymology
From German Kobalt, formerly also Kobald, ‑olt, ‑old, ‑elt, ‑el, apparently the same word as Kobold (“goblin”), from Middle High German, which became also a Harz Mountains silver miners’ term for rock laced with arsenic and sulfur, so called because it degraded the ore and made the miners ill. Doublet of kobold.
Related phrases
More for "cobalt"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.