oil shale
"oil-shale" is a 8-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“oil shale” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a noun. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 9
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - A sedimentary rock containing kerogen from which petroleum-like shale oil can be produced by pyrolysis, hydrogenation, or thermal dissolution.
Corpus desk
Index EN-oil-shale · oil shale · English
oil shale · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-LONG 9 letters
- VOW-4 4 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "O" thin
- PHOTO-UNK Peer pending
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | oil shale |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| Letters | 9 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “oil shale” in English
Rare enough to double-check
oil shale is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as anoun. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. Gloss: "A sedimentary rock containing kerogen from which petroleum-like shale oil can be produced by pyrolysis, hydrogenation, or thermal dissolution.".
No misspelling variants are generated for oil shale in our index, a sign its spelling follows regular English conventions. No close-neighbour confusable shows up for this headword in our dataset, since nothing in our dataset looks or sounds close enough to cause mix-ups.
Wiktionary doesn't record an etymology for this headword, so its spelling is best explained by sound-to-letter mapping rather than etymology. The correct English form is oil shale, spelled O-I-L- -S-H-A-L-E.
Definition
- 1A sedimentary rock containing kerogen from which petroleum-like shale oil can be produced by pyrolysis, hydrogenation, or thermal dissolution.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how oil shale appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
Up in the mountains along both sides of Parachute Creek the Exxon Corporation and other companies have begun to pour billions of dollars into two huge projects to turn the nation's immense reserves of oil shale into shale oil.
Can you imagine squeezing oil from rock? Oil shale is different from the shale gas that is extracted through fracking. It is geologically un-evolved oil: the remnants of organic matter buried underground for millions of years but never sunk deep enough, nor long enough, to be transformed into petroleum.
Synonyms
This word in other languages
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.