Note 16 — Chapter VII · THE FIGURE IN ENAMEL AND THE ENGRAVED PLATE AT THE BACK OF IT

For the etymology: enamel is a compound of the simple amel, which is now obsolete. This was an anglicized form of French émail, which in Old French was esmal, whose cognates were Provençal esmalt, Spanish and Portuguese esmalte, Italian smalto (used by Dante), which, in medieval Latin, was smaltum. The source is Old High German *smaltjan, our verb to smelt, i.e. to fuse by heat (New English Dictionary, v. Amel).