tepetate
tepetate noun: a soil type found in volcanic regions, known for hardness, poor drainage, and poor fertility.
Noun
tepetate (plural tepetates)
- A soil type found in volcanic regions, known for hardness, poor drainage, and poor fertility.
- Where erosion has reduced the soil layer to less than planting depth or to exposed tepetate, farmers may break up and pulverize the tepetate with plows, picks, crowbars, sledgehammers, or even black powder, to form a usable soil layer.1990, Gene C. Wilken, Good Farmers: Traditional Agricultural Resource Management in Mexico and Central America
- Alternating dry and wet periods may favour crystallisation of amorphous aluminium silicates to phyllosilicate clays, so that many tepetates have clay coatings that are due to recrystallisation rather than to clay illuviation (see also Chapter 12).2002, Nico van Breemen, Soil Formation, page 337
Forms of tepetate
| plural | tepetates |
|---|
Origin of tepetate
Borrowed from Spanish tepetate.
Questions about tepetate
- What does tepetate mean?
- Tepetate means a soil type found in volcanic regions, known for hardness, poor drainage, and poor fertility.
- What part of speech is tepetate?
- Tepetate is a noun.
- What is the plural of tepetate?
- The plural of tepetate is tepetates.
Words near tepetate in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: tepetate (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: “tepetate.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/tepetate. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.