While looking up sodium carbonate (dont ask why!) I ran across the term, "glory hole." Sounds like something a lady of easy virtue might wish to possess, but, alas, an easy lass's asset it's not. It's a glassmaker's oven. Any idea how it came to have such a name?

Fascinating term, Asa.

I had understood it to mean not the glassmaker's oven (I think the more precise term is 'furnace') but rather the covered opening in the furnace, which you can open to remove molten glass to be worked. And I'd understood it to have that name from the blazing light that will rush out from a white-hot furnace.

On checking, I found this in Webster's Unabridged, suggesting that etymology: "Glory hole, an opening in the wall of a glass furnace, exposing the brilliant white light of the interior. --Knight." But I also found references to 'glory hole' as meaning a particular kind of glass furnace (rather than the opening in the furnace).

And the glassmaking-meanings were not all. To my surprise, 'glory hole' has five separate meanings, not closely related.

Wow! I'll stop here, leaving for others some of the fun of the search.