earthwash
earthwash noun: soil and other loose sediment that has been gradually washed down from higher land by rainwater.
Noun
earthwash (uncountable)
- Soil and other loose sediment that has been gradually washed down from higher land by rainwater.
- This long strip of low-lying boggy woodland has been formed by earthwash from the land, and gravel from the wave action of the lake.1928, Thomas Hay, “THE SHORE TOPOGRAPHY OF THE ENGLISH LAKES; a paper read at the Meeting of the Society 12 March 1928”, in The Geographical Journal, volume 72, page 43
- The dust and the earthwash, owing to the heavy annual rainfall of the country, filtered through to the bed of the stream, so that as years went on the bottom rose instead of deepening.1935, Mary Gilmore, More Recollections, page 38
Origin of earthwash
From earth + wash.
Questions about earthwash
- What does earthwash mean?
- Earthwash means soil and other loose sediment that has been gradually washed down from higher land by rainwater.
- What part of speech is earthwash?
- Earthwash is a noun.
Words near earthwash in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: earthwash (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Cite this entry: “earthwash.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/earthwash. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.