silt
Definitions
Agriculture
- noun soft mud which settles at the bottom of water
- noun particles of fine quartz with a diameter of 0.002 – 0.06 mm
Construction
- A granular material resulting from the disintegration of rock, with grains largely passing a No. 200 (75-micrometer) sieve.
- Such particles in the range from 2 to 50 micrometers in diameter.
Origin & History of “silt”
The likelihood is
that silt originally referred to the mud in
salt flats by
river estuaries, and that it is etymologically related to
salt. It was probably borrowed
from a Scandinavian
word – Danish and Norwegian
have the apparently related
sylt ‘salt marsh’.
