Flue
adj, noun ·Moderate ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 A pipe or duct that carries gaseous combustion products away from the point of combustion (such as a furnace).
"It has frequently been a subject of inquiry, whether the ancients were acquainted with chimneys, or open fire-places. In the houses discovered at Herculaneum and Pompeii, there are no chimneys; they all appear to have been warmed by furnaces and flues."
- 2 a conduit to carry off smoke wordnet
- 3 An enclosed passageway in which to direct a current of air or other gases along.
- 4 organ pipe whose tone is produced by air passing across the sharp edge of a fissure or lip wordnet
- 5 A woolly or downy substance; down, nap; a piece of this. countable, obsolete, uncountable
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- 6 flat bladelike projection on the arm of an anchor wordnet
- 7 In an organ flue pipe, the opening between the lower lip and the languet.
- 1 Alternative form of flew (“shallow, flat”). UK, alt-of, alternative, dialectal
Example
More examples"A number of pollutants are required to be filtered out from the flue gas of power plants before it can be exhausted to the atmosphere."
Etymology
From Middle English flue, flewe (“mouthpiece of a hunting horn”), of uncertain origin. Perhaps a back-formation from Middle English *flews (mistaken as a plural), from Old English flēwsa (“a flow, flowing, flux”). Alternatively, perhaps an alteration of Middle English floute, fleute, flote (“a pipe”), see English flute. Compare also Middle Dutch vloegh (“groove, channel, flute of a fluted column”).
Related phrases
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.