Hold one thing in mind and the whole word follows: a piece of soft white stone at a window. It is cool and heavy in the hand, the surface is smooth with no grain to catch on, and where the light meets the thin edge the stone glows a little instead of stopping the light. It is soft enough to cut with hand tools, so people have been it into small jars, lamps and figures for thousands of years. Everything else the word does is either that stone, something cut from it, or something borrowing its look.
From the word’s history
The source traces it back through Middle English alabastre and Latin alabaster to Greek alabastros, an earlier form of which meant a small vase without handles for keeping perfume. Those little jars were cut from this stone, and the name moved from the jar to the material.
來源把這個字一路追回去：中古英文 alabastre、古法文、拉丁文 alabaster，再到希臘文 alábastros，更早的形式指的是「裝香膏、沒有把手的小瓶子」。那種小瓶子就是用這種軟石雕成的，名字後來從瓶子搬到了石頭身上。這也解釋了為什麼今天講到它，浮現的多半是小器物，而不是大建築。
Wiktionary, "alabaster"
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