"moly cow" meaning in English

See moly cow in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

IPA: /ˈməʊli kaʊ̯/ [Received-Pronunciation], /ˈmoʊli kaʊ̯/ [General-American] Audio: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-moly cow.wav [Southern-England] Forms: moly cows [plural]
Etymology: Compound of moly (“molybdenum”) (informal) + cow. The term alludes to the fact that the device extracts (“milks”) technetium-99m from molybdenum-99. Etymology templates: {{glossary|Compound}} Compound, {{com+|en|moly<t:molybdenum><qq:informal>|cow}} Compound of moly (“molybdenum”) (informal) + cow Head templates: {{en-noun}} moly cow (plural moly cows)
  1. (chemistry, medicine, informal) A device used to extract the metastable isotope technetium-99m from a source of decaying molybdenum-99. Wikipedia link: Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, molybdenum-99, technetium-99m Tags: informal Synonyms: technetium cow, w:technetium-99m generator Related terms: holy cow

Inflected forms

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          "text": "When the ⁹⁹Tcₘ isotope is needed for medical imaging purposes, it has to be created on the spot because its half-life is only six hours. This is done using a device filled with longer-lived ⁹⁹Mo, which decays into ⁹⁹Tcₘ, continually replenishing the supply within the device. Because the process of removing the accumulated ⁹⁹Tcₘ is called \"milking\", the device is informally known as a \"moly cow.\"",
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          "text": "Clearly, transporting the daughter in equilibrium with the parent is a more economical, safer, and environmentally friendlier approach. This is the reason that \"technetium generators,\" dubbed \"moly cows,\" are transported around the globe instead of the ⁹⁹ᵐTc isotope.",
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This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2026-09-09 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2026-09-02 using wiktextract (ccec6f1 and 4deed51). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.