Meaning & use
Cupel
Last updated
A small, shallow, porous cup made of bone ash, used in assaying to separate precious metals like gold or silver from lead and other base metals by absorption.
See it in a sentence
The assayer heated the ore sample in a cupel until only a bead of pure silver remained.
Old mining towns often kept a cupel furnace running to test the purity of raw ore.
A note on using this word
Also used as a verb, 'to cupel,' meaning to refine metal using this process, called cupellation.
Words with a similar meaning
assay cup
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