Ceramics are highly brittle materials with very high melting point.

They are bas ically oxides or nitrides or carbides of metals. They are more heat and corrosio n resistant than metals. The atoms in ceramic materials are held together by a chemical bond. The two mos t common chemical bonds for ceramic materials are covalent and ionic. For metals , the chemical bond is called the metallic bond. The bonding of atoms together i s much stronger in covalent and ionic bonding than in metallic. That is why, gen erally speaking, metals are ductile and ceramics are brittle. These are materials held together by either type of bond will tend to fracture b efore any plastic deformation takes place. This gives catastrophic failures, as opposed to the normally much more gentle failure modes of metals. For ceramics, the microstructure can be entirely glassy (glasses only); entirely crystalline; or a combination of crystalline and glassy.