loess
/lɜːs/US/ˈloʊ.əs/
loess noun: any sediment, dominated by silt, of eolian (wind-blown) origin.
Noun (1)
loess (countable and uncountable, plural loesses)
- Any sediment, dominated by silt, of eolian (wind-blown) origin.
- 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...1951, Herbert Hoover, “Engineering in China 1899–1902”, in The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover, Years of Adventure 1874–1920, New York: Macmillan Company, →OCLC, →OL, page 45
- 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.1987, Amy Shui, Stuart Thompson, “China and its people”, in Chinese Food and Drink, Wayland Publishers, →ISBN, →OCLC, page 4, column 2
Noun (2) capitalized: LOESS
LOESS (plural LOESSes)
- Acronym of locally estimated scatterplot smoothing.
- Locally weighted regression, or loess, is a procedure for fitting a regression surface to data through multivariate smoothing.1986, William S. Cleveland and Susan J. Delvin, “Locally Weighted Regression: An Approach to Regression Analysis by Local Fitting”, in Journal of the American Statistical Association, volume 83...
loess meaning in Malay, Persian and Vietnamese
loess in Malay
- sediment of eolian origin
- loes
loess in Persian
- sediment of eolian origin
- بادرفت
loess in Vietnamese
- sediment of eolian origin
- hoàng thổ
Examples of loess in a sentence
- The Yellow River—the “Sorrow of China”—comes down from the loess hills into the great plain of China on a gently sloping fan.1951, Herbert Hoover, “Engineering in China 1899–1902”, in The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover, Years of Adventure 1874–1920, New York: Macmillan...
- 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.2022, Thomas Halliday, Otherworlds, Penguin, published 2023, page 3:
Forms of loess
| plural | loesses |
|---|---|
| alternative form | löss |
| plural | LOESSes |
Origin of loess
Borrowed from German Löss (“yellowish-gray soil”), from Alemannic German lösch (“loose”). Cognate with German los and English lease.
Words formed from loess
Questions about loess
- What does loess mean?
- Loess means any sediment, dominated by silt, of eolian (wind-blown) origin.
- What is loess in Malay?
- Loess in Malay is loes. See Loess meaning in Malay.
- How do you use loess in a sentence?
- The Yellow River—the “Sorrow of China”—comes down from the loess hills into the great plain of China on a gently sloping fan.
- What part of speech is loess?
- Loess is a noun.
- How do you pronounce loess?
- Loess is pronounced /lɜːs/ (UK).
- What is the plural of loess?
- The plural of loess is loesses.
Words near loess in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: loess (page history and authors); LOESS (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:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-loess.wav.
Cite this entry: “loess.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/loess. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.