Kiln
noun, verb ·Uncommon ·College level
Definitions
- 1 An oven or furnace or a heated chamber, for the purpose of hardening, burning, calcining or drying anything; for example, firing ceramics, curing or preserving tobacco, or drying grain.
"One typical Grecian kiln engorged one thousand muleloads of juniper wood in a single burn. Fifty such kilns would devour six thousand metric tons of trees and brush annually."
- 2 a furnace for firing or burning or drying such things as porcelain or bricks wordnet
- 1 To bake in a kiln; to fire.
"When making pottery we need to allow the bisque to dry before we kiln it."
Example
More examples"I used to make ash trays in a kiln at school."
Etymology
From Middle English kilne, from Old English cyln, cylen, cylin (“large oven, kiln”), from Latin culīna (“kitchen, kitchen stove”). Middle English -ln(e) usually becomes modern -ll as in mill. The pronunciation /kɪln/ may be based on dialects in which this simplification did not take place, but it must have been at least reinforced by spelling pronunciation.
Related phrases
More for "kiln"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.