soft coal
- noun
- /sɔft koʊl/
- Specialized
:
carbón bituminoso
- Like most power plants in Germany, BoA burns lignite, a soft coal that's sourced from domestic open-cast strip mines and emits about 29 percent more carbon dioxide than hard coal when burned.
Examples
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When I visited the historical mining town, I learned that soft coal was once the primary fuel for households and factories.
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During the soft coal markets of the 1980s, with declining spot prices, relatively high contract prices were the norm.
Academic text (1998) -
There, the Germans are using the area's natural deposits of soft coal to produce synthetic oil, which they use to fuel nearly all of their planes.
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But the United States is no more likely to adopt a one-child policy than China is likely to adopt American-style restrictions on the burning of soft coal.
Academic text (2000) -
The places at which we changed horses (which was done every ten miles) were generally long, old, one-story houses, with stupendous fires of soft coal that are so plentiful and cheap here.
Academic text (1998) -
When demand for soft coal had fallen sometime in the late forties, the strip mine had been abandoned, and the golf course was constructed atop its somewhat softened contours.
Fiction book (2001) -
"Lignite is the lowest-priced type of power generation and thus increasingly stormed the market," Martin Pack, an RWE spokesman, said by phone from Essen, referring to a type of soft coal that dominates RWE's consumption of the fuel.
Blog text (28) -
In winter, many homes rely on soft coal for heating because it burns easily and produces a warm, smoky flame.
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The power plant was criticized for its reliance on soft coal, known for releasing a lot of smoke and carbon emissions.
Synonyms
1
6.6
A soft black coal that burns easily and makes a smoky yellow flame
Antonyms
How Hard
Surface Forms
Morphology
The noun phrase is compositional: 'soft' + 'coal' straightforwardly denotes a type of coal that is softer (as opposed to hard coal), so a B1 learner who knows both words can infer it refers to a specific variety of coal. This subtype labeling is literal and cross-linguistically common, making the meaning readily derivable from the constituents.
Etymology
The noun soft coal comes from how the coal feels and how it burns. Miners called the coal soft because it is crumbly and oily, not hard like other kinds of coal, and it lights easily and makes a lot of smoke, so today soft coal means a kind of coal that 'burns easily' and gives a smoky flame.