Note 380 — Chapter VI · THE PROTO-SIDERIC OR EARLY IRON AGE OF WEAPONS.
Reading edition
Colonel Yule does not consider the word genuine, and with reason, as the Indo-Phœnician (‘Safá’) alphabet has no
w
and no
z
. The word first appears in ‘Experiments and Observations to investigate the Nature of a Kind of Steel manufactured at Bombay, and there called
Wootz
,’ ... by G. Pearson, M.D. (paper read before the Royal Soc., June 11, 1795). He notes that ‘Dr. Scott of Bombay, in a letter to the President, acquainted him that he had sent over “specimens of a substance known by the name of wootz, which is considered to be a kind of steel, and is in high esteem among the Indians”’ (p. 322). In Wilkinson’s
Engines of War
(1841) we read (pp. 203–206), ‘The cakes of steel are called
wootz
.’
Dr. E. Balfour states that uchhá and níchhá (in Hindustani ‘high’ and ‘low’) are used in the Canarese provinces to denote superior and inferior descriptions of articles, and that Wootz may be a corruption of the former. Colonel Yule and his coadjutor in the Glossary of Indian Terms, the late lamented Dr. Burnell, hold that it originated in some clerical error or misreading, perhaps from wook representing the Canarese ukku = steel.