loess
pronunciation
How to pronounce loess in British English:
UK ['ləʊɪs]
How to pronounce loess in American English:
US ['loʊɪs]
-
- Noun:
- a fine-grained unstratified accumulation of clay and silt deposited by the wind
Word Origin
- loess (n.)
- 1833 (in Lyell), "unstratified deposit of loam," coined 1823 by German mineralogist Karl Cäsar von Leonhard (1779-1862) from German Löss "yellowish-gray soil," from Swiss German lösch (adj.) "loose" (compare German los; see loose). Related: Loessial.
Example
- 1. It recommends fairly short-term projects , such as the reclamation works in kenya 's lake naivasha or china 's loess plateau .
- 2. Could there have been a really large dam that caused a deep lake in both zharu and the main valleys and is older than the loess deposits ?
- 3. Then something strange happened : the loess in the terraces wasn 't on top of crushed rock anymore - it was on top of very finely laminated clay-rich sediments .
- 4. That work also used a novel statistical approach ( known as the loess method ) to analyse data , but he points out that its conclusions now appear even more incorrect than rival studies done by un agencies .
- 5. These deposits look suspiciously like some kind of lake or backwater channel deposits , but they are several hundred meters above the current valley floor and underneath loess deposits in terraces .