terra preta
terra preta noun: a very dark, man-made, nutritionally dense soil found in the Amazon basin.
Noun
terra preta (uncountable)
- A very dark, man-made, nutritionally dense soil found in the Amazon basin.
- The two earliest phases are preceramic and the sites are not terra preta. The earliest terra preta is associated with the Massangana Phase, which begins ca 3600 cal BC.2004, The Review of Archæology, Volumes 25-27, Review of Archæology, page 35
- Terra Preta soils of central Amazonia exhibit approximately three times more soil organic matter, nitrogen and phosphorus and 70 times more charcoal compared to adjacent infertile soils.2007, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, volume 362, numbers 1477-1480, Royal Society, page 187
- Synonyms:
- Amazonian dark earth, ADE, Indian black earth
Synonyms of terra preta
- Amazonian dark earth
- ADE
- Indian black earth
Origin of terra preta
Borrowed from Portuguese terra preta, from terra (“soil”) + preta (“black”).
Words formed from terra preta
- synthetic terra preta
- STP
Questions about terra preta
- What does terra preta mean?
- Terra preta means a very dark, man-made, nutritionally dense soil found in the Amazon basin.
- What part of speech is terra preta?
- Terra preta is a noun.
Words near terra preta in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: terra preta (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: “terra preta.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/terra_preta. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.