From 2006

In fact I want to talk about both cement and concrete and explore what is different about them.

The word cement seems to have come into Middle English from Old French and ultimately from Latin.  The earliest ancestor word in Latin has a meaning of small stones that have been chipped off a larger piece.  This name fits with the technology of cement which required the mixing of ground stone of specific kinds, and later more refined processes included heating it until it almost fuses, then re-grinding it into powder.  The resulting material was then, and is now used to mix with water and forms a sort of stone glue to stick blocks of stone or bricks together.

This meaning of mortar was the one that stuck to cement when it entered English in 1300.  Since then it has come to mean other types of glue like rubber cement.

I never made much distinction between cement and concrete, but etymologically the have a different background and evidently they are technically different too.

Concrete is also from Latin but instead of meaning stone chips or dust, the parent word for concrete holds a meaning of growing together.  So in the construction industry concrete is the stuff that results when you mix cement with filler material like sand or gravel.

The cement, cements the gravel together, concretes it together.

When I hear the word concrete used in conversation for example in the phrase “concrete proposal” I always assumed that the proposal was solid, like concrete.  But historically the word concrete was used to apply to things that were blended together tightly, before it was ever poured onto a construction site.

The Oxford English Dictionary tells me that in 1651 the voice sliding up the scale was referred to as an example of concrete sound—as opposed to discrete sounds—while the mixing with gravel and cement had to wait until 1834.

Concrete is given as a sort of antonym of discrete, and although both concrete and discrete are from Latin and one means grow together while the other means separate and distinct, they don’t seem to have been thought of as antonyms until they got into English.

In thinking of cement’s origins with chips from larger blocks of stone I kept thinking of the phrase “a chip off the old block” but I see that according to Michael Quinion of world-wide-words.org the allusion is to carpentry and a block of wood.  He puts the first instance as “chip of the same block” in 1637.