Does ferrous actually mean magnetic? I always thought it meant containing iron? How could Nickel and Cobalt be ferrous if they are elements and not alloys?
In what context have you seen them referred to as ferrous? [source?]
Half of the websites when I google and sometimes the AI summary depending on how it’s googled. This became a debate with my wife last night. I said only iron is ferrous she said showed a bunch of references to Nickel and Cobalt as ferrous.
I also found this in Wikipedia, which seems the most likely reason for the terminology confusion:
In chemistry, the term is largely obsolete, but it often means iron, cobalt, and nickel, also called the iron triad;[1]. It may sometimes refer to other elements that resemble iron in some chemical aspects, such as the stable group 8 elements
They’re not considered ferrous because they don’t contain iron, if they’re considered ferrous in some domain then I suppose it’s a jargon use of the term specific to that domain
Edit: it could also be a confusion with ferromagnetism. Ferrous means “that which contains iron” (from Latin ferrum meaning iron), ferromagnetic is that which is magnetic like iron (there are other kinds of magnetism)
