[1784.—"... We made the wurdee wollah acquainted with the circumstance...."—Forrest, Bombay Letters, ii. 323.
[1861.—"The senior [Ressaldar] (native captain) and the Woordie Major (native adjutant) ... reported that the sepoys were trying to tamper with his men."—Cave-Browne, Punjab and Delhi, i. 120.]
WOOTZ, s. This is an odd name which has attached itself in books to the so-called 'natural steel' of S. India, made especially in Salem, and in some parts of Mysore. It is prepared from small bits of malleable iron (made from magnetic ore) which are packed in crucibles with pieces of a particular wood (Cassia auriculata), and covered with leaves and clay. The word first appears in a paper read before the Royal Society, June 11, 1795, called: "Experiments and observations to investigate the nature of a kind of Steel, manufactured at Bombay, and there called Wootz ... by George Pearson, M.D." This paper is quoted below.
The word has never since been recognised as the name of steel in any language, and it would seem to have originated in some clerical error, or misreading, very possibly for wook, representing the Canarese ukku (pron. wukku) 'steel.' Another suggestion has been made by Dr. Edward Balfour. He states that uchcha and nicha (Hind. uṅcha-nīcha, in reality for 'high' and 'low') are used in Canarese speaking districts to denote superior and inferior descriptions of an article, and supposes that wootz may have been a misunderstanding of uchcha, 'of superior quality.' The former suggestion seems to us preferable. [The Madras Gloss. gives as local names of steel, Can. ukku, Tel. ukku, Tam. and Malayāl. urukku, and derives wootz from Skt. ućća, whence comes H. uṅchā.]
The article was no doubt the famous 'Indian Steel,' the σίδηρος Ἰνδικὸς καὶ στόμωμα of the Periplus, the material of the Indian swords celebrated in many an Arabic poem, the alhinde of old Spanish, the hundwānī of the Persian traders, ondanique of Marco Polo, the iron exported by the Portuguese in the 16th century from Baticalà (see [BATCUL]) in Canara and other parts (see Correa passim). In a letter of the King to the Goa Government in 1591 he animadverts on the great amount of iron and steel permitted to be exported from Chaul, for sale on the African coast and to the Turks in the Red Sea (Archiv. Port. Orient., Fasc. 3, 318).
1795.—"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."—Phil. Trans. for 1795, Pt. ii. p. 322.
[1814.—See an account of wootz, in Heyne's Tracts, 362 seqq.]
1841.—"The cakes of steel are called Wootz; they differ materially in quality, according to the nature of the ore, but are generally very good steel, and are sent into Persia and Turkey.... It may be rendered self-evident that the figure or pattern (of Damascus steel) so long sought after exists in the cakes of Wootz, and only requires to be produced by the action of diluted acids ... it is therefore highly probable that the ancient blades (of Damascus) were made of this steel."—Wilkinson, Engines of War, pp. 203-206.
1864.—"Damascus was long celebrated for the manufacture of its sword blades, which it has been conjectured were made from the wootz of India."—Percy's Metallurgy, Iron and Steel, 860.