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Information about Whitewash

This article is about the paint. For other uses, see Whitewash (disambiguation).


Whitewash, or calcimine, kalsomine, or calsomine is a type of inexpensive paint made from slaked lime (calcium hydroxide) and chalk (whiting). Other additives have historically included water glass, glue, egg white, Portland cement, salt, soap, milk or flour.

Whitewash cures through a reaction with carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to form calcium carbonate in the form of calcite, a reaction known as carbonatation.

It is usually applied externally (as Tom Sawyer was made to do to a fence in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer). Occasionally it is colored and used on interiors, such as the hallways of apartment buildings. Whitewash is especially effective on adobe-like materials because it is absorbed easily and the resultant chemical reaction hardens the substrate.

Lime wash is pure slaked lime in water. It produces a unique surface glow due the to refraction of calcite crystals.

In the middle of the 20th century, when family farms with dairy barns were common in the Upper Midwest, whitewash was a necessary part of routine barn maintenance.

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Whitewash is a type of inexpensive paint.

Whitewash may also refer to:
  • Whitewash (sport), a sports game or series in which the losing person or team fails to score
  • Whitewash (censorship), a form of censorship
  • Whitewash (song), a song by Buckethead

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Paint is any liquid, liquifiable, or mastic composition which after application to a substrate in a thin layer is converted to an opaque solid film.

Paint is used to protect, decorate (such as adding color), or add functionality to an object or surface by covering it
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Calcium hydroxide, also known as slaked lime, is a chemical compound with the chemical formula Ca(OH)2. It is a colourless crystal or white powder, and is obtained when calcium oxide (called lime or quicklime) is with water.
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Chalk (IPA: /ˈtʃɔːk/) is a soft, white, porous sedimentary rock, a form of limestone composed of the mineral calcite.
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Sodium silicate, also known as water glass or liquid glass, available in aqueous solution and in solid form, is a compound used in cements, passive fire protection, refractories, textile and lumber processing.
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An animal glue is an adhesive that is created by prolonged boiling of animal connective tissue. These protein colloid glues are formed through hydrolysis of the collagen from skins, bones, tendons, and other tissues, similar to gelatin.
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Egg white is the common name for the clear liquid (also called the albumen or the glair/glaire) contained within an egg. It is the cytoplasm of the egg, which until fertilization is a single cell (including the yolk).
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Portland cement is the most common type of cement in general usage in many parts of the world, as it is a basic ingredient of concrete, mortar, stucco and most non-specialty grout.
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Salt is a mineral essential for animal life, composed primarily of sodium chloride. Salt for human consumption is produced in different forms: unrefined salt (such as sea salt), refined salt (table salt), and iodized salt.
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Simple Object Access Protocol, and lately also Service Oriented Architecture Protocol, but is now simply SOAP. The original acronym was dropped with Version 1.2 of the standard, which became a W3C Recommendation on June 24 2003, as it was considered to be misleading.
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Milk is an opaque white liquid produced by the mammary glands of female mammals (including monotremes). Mammary glands are highly specialized sweat glands. The female ability to produce milk is one of the defining characteristics of mammals.
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An ingredient used in many foods, flour is a fine powder made by grinding cereals or other edible starchy plant seeds suitable for grinding. It is most commonly made from wheat—the word "flour" used without qualification implies wheatflour—but also maize (now called
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Carbon dioxide is a chemical compound composed of two oxygen atoms covalently bonded to a single carbon atom. It is a gas at standard temperature and pressure and exists in Earth's atmosphere in this state.
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Calcium carbonate is a chemical compound, with the chemical formula CaCO3. It is a common substance found as rock in all parts of the world, and is the main component of shells of marine organisms, snails, and eggshells.
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calcite]] The carbonate mineral, calcite, is a chemical or biochemical calcium carbonate corresponding to the formula CaCO3 and is one of the most widely distributed minerals on the Earth's surface.
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Carbonatation is a chemical reaction where calcium hydroxide reacts with carbon dioxide and forms insoluble calcium carbonate:

Ca(OH)2 + CO2 → CaCO3 + H2O

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The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Frontispiece of 1st edition
Author Mark Twain
Illustrator True Williams
Cover artist created by Mark Twain
Country United States
Language English
Genre(s)
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Adobe is a natural building material mixed from sand, clay, and straw, dung or other fibrous materials, which is shaped into bricks using frames and dried in the sun. It is similar to cob and mudbrick.
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A family farm is a farm owned and operated by a family, and passed down from generation to generation. It is the basic unit of the mostly agricultural economy of much of human history and continues to be so in developing nations.
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Dairy farming is a class of agricultural, or an animal husbandry enterprise, for long-term production of milk, which may be either processed on-site or transported to a dairy factory for processing and eventual retail sale.
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Upper Midwest is a region of the United States with no universally agreed-upon boundary, but it almost always lies within the US Census Bureau's definition of the Midwest and includes the states of Minnesota and Wisconsin, as well as at least the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
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