Word.ws English Dictionary

litterfall

litterfall noun: plant material that falls to the ground, such as leaves from trees.

Noun

litterfall (usually uncountable, plural litterfalls)

  1. (usually) Plant material that falls to the ground, such as leaves from trees.
    • Litterfall is provided for as long as the mature forest exists.2008, Masami Miyaki, Koichi Kaji, “Shift to Litterfall as Year-Round Forage for Sika Deer after a Population Crash”, in Sika Deer, page 186
  2. (countable, usually) The total mass of plant material falling to the ground per unit area, or the mass collected at a specific site.
    • The remaining forest types had similar mean litterfalls ranging from 3333 to 6484 kg ha⁻¹ year⁻¹1986, K.A. Vogt et al., “Production, turnover, and nutrient dynamics of above- and belowground detritus of world forests”, in Advances in Ecological Research, volume 15, page 315

Forms of litterfall

plurallitterfalls

Origin of litterfall

From litter + fall.

Questions about litterfall

What does litterfall mean?
Litterfall means plant material that falls to the ground, such as leaves from trees.
What part of speech is litterfall?
Litterfall is a noun.
What is the plural of litterfall?
The plural of litterfall is litterfalls.

Words near litterfall in the dictionary

  1. litterbug
  2. litterbugs
  3. littered
  4. litterer
  5. litterers
  6. litterfall
  7. litterfalls
  8. littering
  9. litterings
  10. litterless
  11. litterlessness

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: litterfall (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.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “litterfall.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/litterfall. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.