Definitions

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

  • noun Geology The molten rock material under the earth's crust, from which igneous rock is formed by cooling.
  • noun Pharmacology A suspension of particles in a liquid, such as milk of magnesia.
  • noun A mixture of finely divided solids with enough liquid to produce a pasty mass.
  • noun Archaic The residue of fruits after the juice has been expressed; pomace.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun Any crude mixture, especially of organic matters, in the form of a thin paste.
  • noun In medicine
  • noun The thick residuum obtained after subjecting certain substances to pressure to extract the fluid parts.
  • noun The grounds which remain after treating a substance with water, alcohol, or any other menstruum.
  • noun A salve of a certain degree of consistence.
  • noun A confection.
  • noun In petrol., the ground-mass or basis of a rock; that part which is amorphous or which has no decidedly individualized contours, so far as can be made out from examination of thin sections with the aid of a microscope.

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

  • noun Any crude mixture of mineral or organic matters in the state of a thin paste.
  • noun A thick residuum obtained from certain substances after the fluid parts are expressed from them; the grounds which remain after treating a substance with any menstruum, as water or alcohol.
  • noun A salve or confection of thick consistency.
  • noun The molten matter within the earth, the source of the material of lava flows, dikes of eruptive rocks, etc.
  • noun The glassy base of an eruptive rock.
  • noun (Chem.) The amorphous or homogenous matrix or ground mass, as distinguished from well-defined crystals.

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

  • noun geology The molten matter within the earth, the source of the material of lava flows, dikes of eruptive rocks, etc.
  • noun mathematics A basic algebraic structure consisting of a set equipped with a single binary operation.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun molten rock in the earth's crust

Etymologies

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

[Middle English, sediment, dregs, from Latin, from Greek, unguent, from massein, mag-, to knead; see mag- in Indo-European roots.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Ancient Greek μάγμα ("paste").

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Examples

Comments

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  • "According to Bergman and Hausknecht (1996): "There is no generally accepted word for a set with a not necessarily associative binary operation. The word groupoid is used by many universal algebraists, but workers in category theory and related areas object strongly to this usage because they use the same word to mean 'category in which all morphisms are invertible'. The term magma was used by Serre |Lie Algebras and Lie Groups, 1965|." It also appears in Bourbaki's Éléments de mathématique, Algèbre, chapitres 1 à 3, 1970."

    -- From Wikipedia's page for "Magma (algebra)" (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Magma_(algebra)&oldid=848070422)

    July 2, 2018