Initially, ceramics - mostly burnt clay - were used to manufacture container pottery. The first porcelain objects reached Europe out of China in the Medieval Ages. The technique of their manufacturing was a mystery for many hundred years, yet Germans succeeded first to produce fine European porcelain at the beginning of the 18th century. Its elegance and hardness woke the dentists' interest too thus Frenchmen created the first porcelain dentures in the second half of the 18th century. Since then, there has been an increasing demand for esthetic fixed implant dentures instead of removable ones. The development of ceramic materials resulted in better mechanical and optical properties, thus the first fixed porcelain inlays and jacket crowns were introduced already in 1889. The addition of leucite filler crystals to porcelain in the 20th century increased the thermal expansion of the ceramic. It could be fired on common dental casting alloys, so the first porcelain-fused-to-metal (PFM) crown was created in 1962. Several new techniques were developed from the middle of the 1980s to the end of the 1990s to deal with initial shrinkage and achieve better properties. Beyond casting, pressing, and CAD/CAM technology, additive manufacturing opened new perspectives in dentistry several years ago in processing dental ceramics.  Kulcsszavak: fogászati kerámiák, porcelán, CAD/CAM-technológia, fogászattörténet