ore

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

• noun A mineral or an aggregate of minerals from which a valuable constituent, especially a metal, can be profitably mined or extracted.

from The Century Dictionary.

• noun Favor; grace; mercy; clemency; protection.
• noun Honor; glory.
• noun A Middle English form of oar.
• noun A seaweed, especially Fucus vesiculosus or Laminaria digitata. Compare ore-weed.
• noun A kind of fine wool.
• noun Abbreviations of Oregon.
• noun One of the walls which surround the hearth of a Catalan forge.
• noun In the metallurgical treatment of the residue from burning off the sulphur of pyrites in the manufacture of sulphuric acid this material is mixed with common salt, roasted in a suitable furnace with free access of air, and, after cooling, leached with water to extract salts of copper. The dark-red oxid of iron which is left from the leaching is known as purple ore or blue billy. It is reduced to pulverulent metallic iron and used to precipitate copper from the solution obtained in the leaching.
• noun A metalliferous mineral of rock, especially one which is of sufficient value to be mined.
• noun Metal; sometimes, specifically, a precious metal, as gold.
• noun See the qualifying words.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

• noun obsolete Honor; grace; favor; mercy; clemency; happy augury.
• noun The native form of a metal, whether free and uncombined, as gold, copper, etc., or combined, as iron, lead, etc. Usually the ores contain the metals combined with oxygen, sulphur, arsenic, etc. (called mineralizers).
• noun (Mining) A native metal or its compound with the rock in which it occurs, after it has been picked over to throw out what is worthless.
• noun rare Metal.
• noun a low furnace in which rich lead ore is reduced; -- also called Scotch hearth.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

• noun Rock that contains utilitarian materials; primarily a rock containing metals or gems which -- at the time of the rock's evaluation and proposal for extraction -- are able to be separated from its neighboring minerals and processed at a cost that does not exceed those materials' present-day economic values.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

• noun a mineral that contains metal that is valuable enough to be mined
• noun a monetary subunit in Denmark and Norway and Sweden; 100 ore equal 1 krona