煉
liàn HSK7

smelt

炼 (煉) liàn
smelt verb
to heat ore in order to extract metal or to purify metal

古代工匠就在这里采矿炼金。

gǔ​dài gōng​jiàng jiù zài zhè​lǐ cǎi​kuàng liàn​jīn.

Ancient craftsmen mined and smelted gold here.

refine verb
to purify or process substances such as oil, chemicals, or sugar through heating

传说他在深山中隐居，开炉炼丹。

chuán​shuō tā zài shēn​shān zhōng yǐn​jū, kāi​lú liàn​dān.

Legend has it that he lived in seclusion in the deep mountains, refining elixirs.

Frequency
Character
Written text
1,763rd most common 49.2 per million
Movie subtitles
2,070th most common 17.4 per million appears in 9% of films
Word
Movie subtitles
1.88 per million appears in 1% of films
Written text
18.1 per million

Details
HSK 3.0
Level 7
Simplified
炼
Strokes
13
Unicode
U+7149

Sources
Definitions
CC-CEDICT
Frequency data
MTSU Chinese text computingSUBTLEX-CHBCC Corpus (BLCU)