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Lead pencil   /lɛd pˈɛnsəl/   Listen
noun
Lead  n.  
1.
(Chem.) One of the elements, a heavy, pliable, inelastic metal, having a bright, bluish color, but easily tarnished. It is both malleable and ductile, though with little tenacity, and is used for tubes, sheets, bullets, etc. Its specific gravity is 11.37. It is easily fusible (melting point 327.5° C), forms alloys with other metals, and is an ingredient of solder and type metal. Atomic number 82. Atomic weight, 207.2. Symbol Pb (L. Plumbum). It is chiefly obtained from the mineral galena, lead sulphide.
2.
An article made of lead or an alloy of lead; as:
(a)
A plummet or mass of lead, used in sounding at sea.
(b)
(Print.) A thin strip of type metal, used to separate lines of type in printing.
(c)
Sheets or plates of lead used as a covering for roofs; hence, pl., a roof covered with lead sheets or terne plates. "I would have the tower two stories, and goodly leads upon the top."
3.
A small cylinder of black lead or graphite, used in pencils.
Black lead, graphite or plumbago; so called from its leadlike appearance and streak. (Colloq.)
Coasting lead, a sounding lead intermediate in weight between a hand lead and deep-sea lead.
Deep-sea lead, the heaviest of sounding leads, used in water exceeding a hundred fathoms in depth.
Hand lead, a small lead use for sounding in shallow water.
Krems lead, Kremnitz lead, a pure variety of white lead, formed into tablets, and called also Krems white, or Kremnitz white, and Vienna white.
Lead arming, tallow put in the hollow of a sounding lead. See To arm the lead (below).
Lead colic. See under Colic.
Lead color, a deep bluish gray color, like tarnished lead.
Lead glance. (Min.) Same as Galena.
Lead line
(a)
(Med.) A dark line along the gums produced by a deposit of metallic lead, due to lead poisoning.
(b)
(Naut.) A sounding line.
Lead mill, a leaden polishing wheel, used by lapidaries.
Lead ocher (Min.), a massive sulphur-yellow oxide of lead. Same as Massicot.
Lead pencil, a pencil of which the marking material is graphite (black lead).
Lead plant (Bot.), a low leguminous plant, genus Amorpha (Amorpha canescens), found in the Northwestern United States, where its presence is supposed to indicate lead ore.
Lead tree.
(a)
(Bot.) A West Indian name for the tropical, leguminous tree, Leucaena glauca; probably so called from the glaucous color of the foliage.
(b)
(Chem.) Lead crystallized in arborescent forms from a solution of some lead salt, as by suspending a strip of zinc in lead acetate.
Mock lead, a miner's term for blende.
Red lead, a scarlet, crystalline, granular powder, consisting of minium when pure, but commonly containing several of the oxides of lead. It is used as a paint or cement and also as an ingredient of flint glass.
Red lead ore (Min.), crocoite.
Sugar of lead, acetate of lead.
To arm the lead, to fill the hollow in the bottom of a sounding lead with tallow in order to discover the nature of the bottom by the substances adhering.
To cast the lead, or To heave the lead, to cast the sounding lead for ascertaining the depth of water.
White lead, hydrated carbonate of lead, obtained as a white, amorphous powder, and much used as an ingredient of white paint.





Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48


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"Lead pencil" Quotes from Famous Books



... case in point: A well known French firm has been writing weekly letters for the past eighteen months to a New England factory trying to persuade the Manager to mark his export cases with a stencil plate and in ink rather than with a heavy lead pencil, as the latter marking is almost obliterated by the time the shipment arrives at Havre. In fact, this French firm went to the extent of sending a stencil and brush to New England to be used in marking the firm's cases. But the old pencil habit is too strong and a weekly hunt has to be ...
— The War After the War • Isaac Frederick Marcosson
... down with space left between them, he delivered in writing their etymologies, definitions, and various significations. The authorities were copied from the books themselves, in which he had marked the passages with a black-lead pencil, the traces of which could be easily effaced. I have seen several of them in which that trouble had not been taken, so that they were just as when used by the copyists. It is remarkable that he was so attentive to the choice of the ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... gentle soul." It is a curious fact that, in common with most draughtsmen, Leech never became reconciled to the fact that black printer's-ink cannot exactly render the tender grey tones of a hard lead pencil; but to the fact that he had not much to complain of Mr. Frith bears witness: "I once saw one of Leech's drawings on the wood, and I afterwards saw it in Punch, and I remember wondering at the fidelity with which it was rendered. Some of the lines, finer than the ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... head of this population, as regards both the finish and the magnitude of the structure, stands the Three-pronged Osmia (Osmia tridentata, DUF. and PER.), to whom this chapter shall be specially devoted. Her gallery, which has the diameter of a lead pencil, sometimes descends to a depth of twenty inches. It is at first almost exactly cylindrical; but, in the course of the victualling, changes occur which modify it slightly at geometrically determined distances. ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... a necrotic fragment of the clavicle. The patient was a boy of sixteen, who climbed up a lamp-post to get a light for his bicycle lamp; his feet slipped off the ornamental ledge which passed horizontally around the post about four feet from the ground, and he fell. In the fall a lead pencil in his waistcoat pocket caught on the ledge and was driven into the axilla, breaking off out of sight. This was supposed to be a piece of the clavicle, and was only discovered to be a pencil when it was ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould


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