Meaning & use
batea
Last updated
A shallow wooden pan or trough, traditionally used in Latin America for washing sand or gravel to separate gold or other minerals by hand.
See it in a sentence
Prospectors swirled river silt in a batea, watching for flecks of gold at the bottom.
The museum displayed an old wooden batea once used by nineteenth-century placer miners.
A note on using this word
A loanword from Spanish (ultimately from an indigenous Caribbean language), the batea remains a traditional tool in small-scale gold panning across Latin America.
Words with a similar meaning
gold pantrough
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