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noun

Nitre, Niter n.

(Chem.) A white crystalline semitransparent salt; potassium nitrate; saltpeter. See Saltpeter.

(Chem.) Native sodium carbonate; natron. (Obs.) "For though thou wash thee with niter, and take thee much soap, yet thine iniquity is marked before me."

Cubic niter, a deliquescent salt, sodium nitrate, found as a native incrustation, like niter, in Peru and Chile, whence it is known also as Chile saltpeter.

Niter bush (Bot.), a genus (Nitraria) of thorny shrubs bearing edible berries, and growing in the saline plains of Asia and Northern Africa.

Nitre n. (Chem.) See Niter.

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Etymology of 'Nitre'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Nitre" Quotes from Famous Books

... seat soon failing, meets A vast vacuity. All unawares, Fluttering his pennons vain, plumb-down he drops Ten thousand fathom deep, and to this hour Down had been falling, had not, by ill chance, The strong rebuff of some tumultuous cloud, Instinct with fire and nitre, hurried him As many miles aloft. That fury stayed— Quenched in a boggy Syrtis, neither sea, Nor good dry land—nigh foundered, on he fares, Treading the crude consistence, half on foot, Half flying; behoves him now both oar and sail. As when a gryphon through the wilderness ...

— Paradise Lost • John Milton

... India saltpetre (nitrate of potassa); and as, in the chemical manufacture neither the potash nor the soda were required, but only the nitric acid, in combination with the alkali, the soda-saltpetre of South America soon supplanted the potash-nitre of the East. The manufacture of sulphuric acid received a new impulse; its price was much diminished without injury to the manufacturer; and, with the exception of fluctuations caused by the impediments thrown in ...

— Familiar Letters of Chemistry • Justus Liebig

... a five miles' chase, the sight of the man acted on my moral nature as vinegar is erroneously supposed to act on nitre. I reined-up beside him. The Irresistible was about to encounter the Immovable; and, even in the excitement of the time, I awaited the result with scientific interest. When a collision of this kind takes place, it sometimes happens that the Irresistible bounces off in ...

— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy

... Powdered nitre moistened with water and applied to the face night and morning, is said to remove freckles without injury ...

— The Whitehouse Cookbook (1887) - The Whole Comprising A Comprehensive Cyclopedia Of Information For - The Home • Mrs. F.L. Gillette

... set up armories, and were making guns as fast as they could. Their greatest trouble was about powder. They had chemists who knew how to make it, but they had no nitre to make it of, and did not know at first how to get any. At last one of their chemists said that there was some nitre—from a few ounces to a pound or two—in the earth of every cellar floor; and that if all the nitre in all the cellar floors of France could be collected, it would be enough ...

— Strange Stories from History for Young People • George Cary Eggleston

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