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say it: KWIK-sil-vur
quicksilver is a noun and adjective meaning "a heavy silvery toxic univalent and bivalent metallic element; the only metal that is liquid at ordinary temperatures". It carries 2 recorded senses.
a heavy silvery toxic univalent and bivalent metallic element; the only metal that is liquid at ordinary temperatures
liable to sudden unpredictable change
“erratic behavior”
“fickle weather”
“mercurial twists of temperament”
“a quicksilver character, cool and willful at one moment, utterly fragile the next”
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for quicksilver come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.