Definitions

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

  • noun A usually white, hard mineral, Al2SiO5, occurring in highly metamorphosed rock as long, slender, fibrous crystals.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A silicate of aluminium (Al2SiO5), having the same composition as andalusite and cyanite.

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

  • noun (Min.) Same as fibrolite.

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

  • noun mineralogy A fibrous neosilicate mineral, polymorphic with andalusite and kyanite, with the chemical formula Al2SiO5.

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[After Benjamin Silliman.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Named after American chemist and geologist Benjamin Silliman (1779-1864) in 1824.

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Examples

  • Kyanite and its related mineral “cousins,” sillimanite and andalusite, are called polymorphs.

    Kyanite 2008

  • Relative to one another, kyanite forms in a lower temperature/higher pressure environment; andalusite forms in a lower temperature/lower pressure environment, and sillimanite forms in a higher temperature/higher pressure environment.

    Kyanite 2008

  • In the second phase, the company would expand the capacities for producing the existing minerals while taking up works to produce sillimanite flour, sintered sillimanite grains and other minerals in the fourth phase.

    Daily News & Analysis 2010

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