- 1坩堝
A crucible is a small, tough pot made of material that can stand fierce heat — fire-clay, special ceramic, or certain metals. You put a substance in it and heat it until it melts or changes: chemists, metal workers, and jewellers all use one. An ordinary kitchen pot would crack or melt; that is the whole point of a crucible. In a lab it often sits in a little clay triangle on a stand, with a burner underneath. Though actually, English also stretches the word. Writers call a war, a hard school, or a painful year “a crucible” — a place of heat that tests you and changes you, the way fire changes metal. There is a famous play called The Crucible that uses that picture. In a science class, though, the word still means the little pot. It is a formal, slightly technical noun.
From the word’s history
From Latin crucibulum 'melting-pot, night-lamp', apparently from crux 'cross'; uncertain.
源自拉丁文 crucibulum「熔鍋、夜燈」，可能和 crux「十字」有關。
組成From Latin crucibulum, which meant a night-lamp and also a melting-pot. Scholars think it may come from crux, “cross” (perhaps built like thuribulum, the word for a censer, with the suffix -bulum), or from crucio, “to torment.” Nobody is fully sure which.
原始詞典資料4 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
cruciblenoun/ˈkɹuː.sɪ.bəl/
- 1
chemistrynatural-sciencesphysical-sciencesA cup-shaped piece of laboratory equipment used to contain chemical compounds when heating them to very high temperatures.
- In one corner of the closet was a very small furnace, with a glowing fire in it, and on the fire a kind of duplicate crucible—two crucibles connected by a tube. One of these crucibles was nearly full of lead in a state of fusion, but not reaching up to the aperture of the tube, which was close to the brim.
- He turned the downstairs drawing room into a lab, installing a furnace, crucible, and fume hood, and stocking it with hundreds of beakers, flasks, pipes, and balances.
- 2
A heat-resistant container in which metals are melted, usually at temperatures above 500°C, commonly made of graphite with clay as a binder.
- 3
The bottom and hottest part of a blast furnace; the hearth.
- 4
A very difficult and trying experience, that acts as a refining or hardening process.
- But, in considering an author and his works as one, a sufficient distinction is not drawn between the ideal and the real: the last is only given by being past through the crucible of the first.
- We should give our support to the liberation of the captive nations of the world and deliver our compatriots from their crucible of suffering. In other words, we should take up the difficult task of reshaping the world’s destiny by destroying the tyrannical Communist rule now afflicting the earth and by delivering humankind from the Red holocaust.
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。