Have you ever seen coal in real life?
I just realised that I have never seen or used it, neither crude oil of course, but there are more variants of it than this natural mineral that powers a lot of the world.
What led to you seeing or touching coal?
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In my language I don't think there's a distinction between the two, but you can say it's barbecue coal etc.
There better be. Charcoal is semi-burnt wood. Coal is effectively ‘solid’ oil. Cooking with regular coal would be horrible.
In my language, the word for coal refers to both types, but you can specify "wood coal" or "rock coal" if necessary.
It makes sense. Coal in English is a word that originally meant a burning ember and likely related to charcoal that we then changed to exclusively mean rock coal. Since it didn't happen until the 1300s and we were producing charcoal long before that.
If anything charcoal is redundant. It's a word with an origin like "burned burned" (though char comes from change, not burn)
https://www.etymonline.com/word/coal
We have like barbecue coal or bricettes, and coal ore as far as I know but I am no coal miner.
Either way it's not like we get them confused because our language is a certain way.