Sealant
substance used to block the passage of fluids through the surface or joints or openings in materials
Sealant is a substance used to block the passage of fluids through openings in materials, a type of mechanical seal. In building construction sealant is sometimes synonymous with caulk (especially if acrylic latex or polyurethane based) and also serve the purposes of blocking dust, sound and heat transmission. Sealants may be weak or strong, flexible or rigid, permanent or temporary. Sealants are not adhesives but some have adhesive qualities and are called adhesive-sealants or structural sealants.
History
Sealants were first used in prehistory in the broadest sense as mud, grass and reeds to seal dwellings from the weather such as the daub in wattle and daub and quincha. Natural sealants and adhesive-sealants included pine pitch and birch pitch, bitumen, wax, tar, natural gum, clay (mud) mortar, lime mortar, lead, blood, and egg. In the 17th century glazing putty was first used to seal window glass made with linseed oil and chalk, later other drying oils were also used to make oil-based putties. In the 1920s, polymers such as acrylic polymers, butyl polymers and silicone polymers were first developed and used in sealants. By the 1960s, synthetic-polymer-based sealants were widely available.
Function
Sealants, despite not having great strength, convey a number of properties.
“Sealant” enters the record as substance used to block the passage of fluids through the surface or joints or openings in materials. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Sealant, substance and used can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Sealant” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Sealant, substance and used provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1427914. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sealant” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.