WORD OF THE DAY: FISSILE

“In Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a whopping 50,000 people worked to create the material, enriched uranium, needed for Los Alamos’ bomb, while thousands more created another fissile material, plutonium, in Hanford, Washington. Including the hundreds of thousands of construction workers who built these labs and boomtowns, ‘the Oak Ridge and Hanford sites alone hired more than a half-million employees,’ the U.S. Department of Energy said.” — Mark Kaufman, Mashable.com, 2 Sept. 2023.

Did You Know?

When scientists first used fissile back in the 1600s, the notion of splitting an atom would have seemed far-fetched indeed. At that time, people thought that atoms were the smallest particles of matter that existed and therefore could not be split. Fissile (which can be traced back to the Latin verb findere, meaning “to split”) was used in reference to things like rocks. When we hear about fissile materials today, the reference is usually to nuclear fission: the splitting of an atomic nucleus that releases a huge amount of energy. But there is still a place in our language for the original sense of fissile (and for the noun fissility, meaning “the quality of being fissile”). A geologist or builder, for example, might describe slate as being fissile, as it splits readily into thin slabs.

Merriam Webster Dictionary