Handbook of Glass Science

A glass is an amorphous (non-crystalline) solid material. Glasses are typically brittle and often optically transparent. Glass is commonly used for windows bottles modern hard drives and eyewear and examples of glassy materials include soda-lime glass borosilicate glass acrylic glass sugar glass Muscovy-glass and aluminium oxynitride. The term glass developed in the late Roman Empire. It was in the Roman glassmaking center at Trier now in modern Germany that the late-Latin term glesum originated probably from a Germanic word for a transparent lustrous substance.