rare earth
11
6.6
- noun
- /rɛr ɜrθ/
- Specialized
:
elemento de tierras raras
- China currently controls almost all of the world's supply of rare earth metals, which are essential for many modern technologies.
- rare earth elements
- rare earth magnets
- rare earth metals
But Greenland has what they call rare earth minerals.
- But Greenland has what they call rare earth minerals.
- I mean, this is just we, we, we were shareholders in a very rich rare earth mine in Burundi.
- So, you know, and, and China right now is controls most of the world's rare earths that are needed for wind and solar.
- So we're going to stop exporting to you Germanium, gallium, the rare earths.
- So yesterday China talked about banning certain rare earth exports that are needed in ships to America.
- We I find out the other day that the government wants a lot of what we call rare earth elements because they go on all kinds of devices.
- But if you remove one of those rare earths, the whole thing, you lose it completely.
- Could they have the potential to replace rare earths?
- Just because it's prevalent in the Earth's crust, much like rare earth materials sound like they should be not abundant.
- That's not even the hard power of they're going to play hardball with a corner on rare earth metals, a corner on on manufacturing.
- They care about some very simple things like money, oil, precious metals, rare earth metals, land, force, power, military capacity, right?
Examples
-
Green campaigners love wind turbines, but the permanent magnets used to manufacture a three-megawatt turbine, contain some two tons of rare earth.
-
We've already seen the effect of rare earth supply issues in computer technology production.
Blog text (15) -
On the other hand, we do not call them 'rare earth' elements for nothing.
Academic text (2010) -
Are we relying on China for the rare earth minerals that we need to produce these cars?
-
Its mountains are rich in minerals and rare earth metals.
-
But you need huge amounts of rare earth metals to make one solar panel.
-
Rare earth processing in China is a messy, dangerous, polluting business.
-
Mount Fuji is a volcano rich in rare earth elements.
-
Will our dependency on foreign-mined rare earth elements replace oil as a national security issue?
Blog text (14) -
All the inhabited worlds had long ago exhausted their natural supplies of rare-earth elements, prized for many uses in nanocircuitry.
Fiction book (1998)
Synonyms
1
6.3
A metal like neodymium used in electronics and strong magnets
1
9.9
A group of fifteen metals like cerium used in magnets and lasers
A metal with an atomic number from 57 to 71
One of fifteen metals used to make magnets and electronic parts
Surface Forms
Morphology
The technical sense 'a group of metallic chemical elements (lanthanides)' is not predictable from 'rare' (infrequent) + 'earth' (soil/element) for an average B1 learner, who would likely infer 'uncommon ground/soil' or simply 'something uncommon related to earth'. This is a specialized, lexicalized term in chemistry whose meaning must be learned as a unit rather than composed from the constituents, so it is opaque.
Etymology
Rare earth comes from old miners and chemists who called certain hard-to-find minerals earth when they found them in rocks. Because these minerals were unusual, they were called rare earths, and today rare earth means the metals from those minerals that we use in electronics.