metals

1. 1
   noun

   Plural of metal.

   Heavy metals can build up in river mud over many years.

   Engineers test which metals best resist corrosion before choosing one.

   Note

   The plural turns a mass noun into a count of kinds. Metal is the stuff; metals are the distinct elements or alloys, as in heavy metals. One specialist use reaches much wider: in the study of stars, metals are every element beyond hydrogen and helium, oxygen and carbon included. The same spelling also names a railway's track and the road-surfacing verb.

2. 2
   nouncountableplural

   The running rails, or the rail network, owned by a particular railway company or organization.

   Signalmen warned that a fallen branch had blocked the metals near the junction.

   The company laid new metals along the entire branch line that summer.

   Similarrails, tracks, track

   Note

   A railwayman's word that exists only in the plural, so one rail is never a metal. It works best with an owner attached, as in British Rail metals or our metals, and then it means a company's own lines rather than steel in general. Two trains can run level until their metals part at Wilton. Kipling uses it in Kim, and D. H. Lawrence in Sons and Lovers, where the metals gleam coldly.

3. 3
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present indicative of metal. Mainly British.

   The county metals its rural roads with layers of broken stone before winter.

   Whenever the surface wears through, the foreman metals the embankment road again.

   Note

   Here the verb belongs to road-building, not metalwork. It comes from metal in its sense of crushed stone laid as a road surface. Its object is the way being surfaced, such as a road, a lane or an embankment. A council that metals a track is spreading broken rock, not plating or cladding anything with steel.

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