loess

• löss

Borrowed from German Löss (“yellowish-gray soil”), from Alemannic German lösch (“loose”). Cognate with German los and English lease.

• (UK) IPA^(key): /lɜːs/, /ˈləʊɪs/

  • Audio (Southern England):

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• (US) IPA^(key): /ˈloʊ.əs/, /lɛs/, /lʌs/
• Rhymes: -ɜːs, -əʊɪs, -oʊəs, -ʌs

loess (countable and uncountable, plural loesses)

1. (geology) Any sediment, dominated by silt, of eolian (wind-blown) origin.
   • 1951, Herbert Hoover, “Engineering in China 1899–1902”, in The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover, Years of Adventure 1874–1920‎^[1], New York: Macmillan Company, →OCLC, →OL, page 45:

     The Yellow River—the “Sorrow of China”—comes down from the loess hills into the great plain of China on a gently sloping fan. The river has two possible outlets to the sea, the one north of the Shantung Peninsula into the Gulf of Chihli, the other some hundreds of miles to the south of the Peninsula.

   • 1987, Amy Shui, Stuart Thompson, “China and its people”, in Chinese Food and Drink‎^[2], Wayland Publishers, →ISBN, →OCLC, page 4, column 2:

     The Yellow River got its name from the massive amount of fertile loess (yellow earth) which it has deposited in the wheat-growing North China Plain.

   • 2022, Thomas Halliday, Otherworlds, Penguin, published 2023, page 3:

     They blast their sand westwards across the steppe, coating the foothills of the Brooks Range in an icing-sugar dust of the loose, windblown sand-silt mixture known as loess.

• Douglas Harper (2001–2026), “loess”, in Online Etymology Dictionary.

• selos, sloes, losse, soles, loses

• loesse

• Hyphenation: loess

loess m (uncountable)

1. (geology) loess (accumulation of wind-blown sediment)

• “loess”, in Dicionário Aulete Digital (in Portuguese), Rio de Janeiro: Lexikon Editora Digital, 2008–2026
• “loess”, in Dicionário Priberam da Língua Portuguesa (in Portuguese), Lisbon: Priberam, 2008–2026

Borrowed from French lœss.

loess n (plural loessuri)

1. loess