Vegetable oil

Description

An oil extracted from plant parts, such as seeds, fruits, or nuts. Vegetable oils contain a mixture of glycerides. Drying oils with a high number of unsaturated glycerides (oleic and linoleic) can oxidize to form hard, insoluble films. Nondrying oils contain mostly saturated glycerides and do not thicken readily.

Examples of vegetable oils:

-Drying oils (linseed, tung, perilla, walnut, etc.) -mainly used in paints

-Semidrying oils (cottonseed, soybean, etc.) -used in paints, soaps and food

-Nondrying oils (coconut, corn, olive, etc.) -mainly used as food products

Synonyms and Related Terms

huile végétale (Fr.); aceite vegetal (Esp.); olio vegetale (It);

Additional Information

J.S. Mills, R.White, The Organic Chemistry of Museum Objects, Butterworth Heinemann, London, 1994.

Authority

• G.S.Brady, Materials Handbook, McGraw-Hill Book Co., New York, 1971 Comment: p. 485

• Ralph Mayer, A Dictionary of Art Terms and Techniques, Harper and Row Publishers, New York, 1969 (also 1945 printing)

• Richard S. Lewis, Hawley's Condensed Chemical Dictionary, Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York, 10th ed., 1993

• Random House, Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language, Grammercy Book, New York, 1997

• The American Heritage Dictionary or Encarta, via Microsoft Bookshelf 98, Microsoft Corp., 1998

• Art and Architecture Thesaurus Online, http://www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabulary/aat/, J. Paul Getty Trust, Los Angeles, 2000