A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1467 entries
iron gall
Iron gall is the ink Europe wrote in for well over a thousand years. It is made from oak galls, which are rich in tannic acid, crushed and steeped and then combined with iron sulfate and a binder. The mixture goes on pale and darkens on the page as it oxidizes, and because it bonds into the fibers rather than sitting on top of them it cannot be scraped off cleanly, which made it the legal standard for documents.
Etymology
The name is the recipe. Gall here is the oak apple, and the word came into English from Latin meaning that growth specifically, since it was the gall that mattered commercially. Iron sulfate was known as copperas or green vitriol, and old recipes call for it under those names.
Notes
Magna Carta, Leonardo’s notebooks, Bach’s manuscripts, the United States Constitution, and most of what survives of European writing before the twentieth century are written in the juice of a wasp’s nursery. The ink is acidic and eats slowly into paper over centuries, which is a major concern in archives, and the treatment for it is a whole subfield of conservation.