Word.ws English Dictionary

silt

/sɪlt/

silt noun: mud or fine earth deposited from running or standing water.

Noun

silt (countable and uncountable, plural silts)

  1. (uncountable) Mud or fine earth deposited from running or standing water.
    • A large tube is then followed over several silt banks to surface after a total dive of 200 m in a large passage containing an active streamway – The San Agustin Way. 5 m before the passage surfaces another line junction is passed, ...2006, Duncan Price, Welsh Sump Index, Lulu.com, →ISBN, page 41
    Synonyms:
    slitch
  2. (broadly, uncountable) Any material with similar physical characteristics, regardless of its origins or transport.
  3. (countable) A particle from 3.9 to 62.5 microns in diameter, following the Wentworth scale.
    • Above the lower headcut, phreatophytic mesquite and little leaf sumac hug the banks, drawing pendulate water from the silts remaining from former marsh deposits and sending long taproots into channel stores.2007, Susan L. Woodward, “Modern Vegetation of the Murray Springs Area and the Upper San Pedro Valley”, in Caleb Vance Haynes, Bruce B. Huckell, editor, Murray Springs, page 58
    • The gravels, initially deposited by surf-zone processes during the Pleistocene low stands in this area were drowned by quartzose sands, and then the prodeltaic silts and clays deposited by the seaward prograding-feather edge of the Holocene Orange Delta were subsequently integrated into the...2015 December 1, “Infaunal Benthic Communities from the Inner Shelf off Southwestern Africa Are Characterised by Generalist Species”, in PLOS ONE, →DOI

Verb

silt (third-person singular simple present silts, present participle silting, simple past and past participle silted)

  1. (transitive) To clog or fill with silt.
  2. (intransitive) To become clogged with silt.
    • Subject to flooding by the six small rivers coming together just west of the city, the main river below the city has long been shallow and subject to silting. The Communists have both maintained the earlier pattern of dredging the river, and have built a bypass flood canal around the city on the...1972, “TIENTSIN (T'IEN-CHING)”, in Encyclopedia Britannica, volume 21, →ISBN, →LCCN, →OCLC, page 1140, column 1
    • They are city-dwellers, men whose lives pass in the shadows of buildings, whose lungs are silted with coalsmoke, and few will ever cross the sea.2017, Sarah Moss, “London, summer 1878”, in Signs for Lost Children, New York, N.Y.: Europa Editions, →ISBN, page 16
  3. (ambitransitive) To flow through crevices; to percolate.

silt meaning in Hindi, Tamil, Urdu and Bengali

silt in Hindi

fine earth deposited by water
गाद gād

silt in Tamil

சேற்றுப் படிவு, சேற்றுப்படிவு, வண்டல், அடையல், மண்டி

silt in Urdu

گاد سے بھر جانا

silt in Bengali

পলি, কাদা
More languagesFewer languages
silt in Telugu
వండ vaṇḍa
silt in Malayalam
ഊറൽ, എക്കൽ, കരവളം, കുടിവളം
silt in Kannada
ವಂಡು, ಕೆಸರು, ಬುರುದೆ, ಹೂಳು
silt in Tagalog
labon
silt in Arabic
غَرِين ḡarīn
silt in Indonesian
silt, debu

Examples of silt in a sentence

  • The old drainage pipe would oppilate whenever leaves and silt collected inside it.
  • They filtered silt and fines out of the soil.
  • The silt collects in the backward part of the tank.

All 26 example sentences with silt

Synonyms of silt

Forms of silt

Noun
pluralsilts
Verb
third-person singular presentsilts
present participlesilting
past participlesilted
pastsilted

Plural of silt: silts

Origin of silt

PIE word *sḗh₂l From Middle English silte, cilte, cylte, perhaps from Middle English silen ("to filter; strain"; equivalent to sile + -t), or cognate with Norwegian and Danish sylt (“salt marsh”), Middle Low German sulte (“salt-marsh”), German Sülze (“meat in aspic”), ultimately from Proto-Germanic *sultijō (“salty water; brine”). Related to Old English sealt (“salt”).

Words formed from silt

Words that rhyme with silt

7 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about silt

What does silt mean?
Silt means mud or fine earth deposited from running or standing water.
What is silt in Hindi?
Silt in Hindi is गाद (gād). See Silt meaning in Hindi.
What part of speech is silt?
Silt can be a noun or a verb.
How do you pronounce silt?
Silt is pronounced /sɪlt/.
What is the plural of silt?
The plural of silt is silts.

Words near silt in the dictionary

  1. silsila
  2. silsilas
  3. silska rada
  4. silski rady
  5. Silsoe
  6. silt
  7. silt up
  8. siltage
  9. siltation
  10. siltations
  11. siltbush

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: silt (page history and authors); silt (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors); silt (Urdu Wiktionary) (page history and authors); silt (Bengali Wiktionary) (page history and authors); వండ (Telugu) (page history and authors); silt (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license); silt (Kannada Wiktionary) (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)-I learned some phrases-silt.wav.

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