Silt

Quick meaning: Silt is a noun meaning (uncountable) Mud or fine earth deposited from running or standing water.

Meaning

(uncountable) Mud or fine earth deposited from running or standing water.

More Meanings

1. (uncountable, by extension) Any material with similar physical characteristics, regardless of its origins or transport.
2. (countable, geology) A particle from 3.9 to 62.5 microns in diameter, following the Wentworth scale.
3. (transitive) To clog or fill with silt.
4. (intransitive) To become clogged with silt.
5. (ambitransitive) To flow through crevices; to percolate.

Example Sentences

They are city-dwellers, men whose lives pass in the shadows of buildings, whose lungs are silted with coalsmoke, and few will ever cross the sea.

Above the lower headcut, phreatophytic mesquite and little leaf sumac hug the banks, drawing pendulate water from the silts remaining from former marsh deposits and sending long taproots into channel stores.

A large tube is then followed over several silt banks to surface after a total dive of 200 m in a large passage containing an active streamway – The San Agustin Way. 5 m before the passage surfaces another line junction is passed, .

The gravels, initially deposited by surf-zone processes during the Pleistocene low stands in this area were drowned by quartzose sands, and then the prodeltaic silts and clays deposited by the seaward prograding-feather edge of the Holocene Orange Delta were subsequently integrated into the delta-front by bioturbation.

Word Forms

• silts
• silting
• silted

Synonyms for silt

Depending on context, synonyms include slitch.

Related Words

Related dictionary entries include siltation, sediment, alluvium, sludge, sand, slime.

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