Industrial-grade or poorly crystallized diamond, used for grinding, cutting, and polishing tools and machinery.
From Dutch 'boart', probably of African origin. Bort refers to diamond fragments and imperfectly formed diamonds unsuitable for jewelry but perfect for industrial abrasive applications.
Bort's discovery revolutionized industry—before synthetic abrasives, bort was THE cutting tool for manufacturing, meaning that 'imperfect' diamonds were actually more economically valuable than perfect ones for factories and mills.
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