from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
noun Material that settles to the bottom of a liquid; lees.
noun Solid fragments of inorganic or organic material that come from the weathering of rock and are carried and deposited by wind, water, or ice.
from The Century Dictionary.
To allow to settle; settle: said of matter in suspension in a liquid.
noun In a steam-boiler, an internal deposit of precipitate from the feed-water, or of solid matter mechanically present, which lies as a loose or soft mud on the heating surfaces: distinguished from scale, which is a hard crystalline coating adhering to the metal.
noun The matter which settles to the bottom of water or any other liquid; settlings; lees; dregs; in geology, detrital material mechanically suspended in or deposited from water; the material of which the sedimentary rocks are composed.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
noun The matter which subsides to the bottom, from water or any other liquid; settlings; lees; dregs.
noun (Geol.) The material of which sedimentary rocks are formed.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
noun A collection of small particles, particularly dirt, that precipitates from a river or other body of water.
verb transitive To deposit material as a sediment.
verb intransitive To be deposited as a sediment.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
verb settle as sediment
verb deposit as a sediment
noun matter that has been deposited by some natural process
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
[Latin sedimentum, act of settling, from sedēre, to sit, settle; see sed- in Indo-European roots.]
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
From Latin sedimentum < sedeō.
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Examples
E. coli was deteced in sediment samples but no standards exist for determining human health risks from E. coli in soil or sediment.
But Dr. Atiq Rahman, a lead author of a UN report on climate change, says this may not make the country any less vulnerable: “The rate at which sediment is deposited and new land is created is much slower than the rate at which climate change and sea level rises are taking place.”
Since 2006 he participates in the Sagalasoss Project and so far, most of his research in Sagalassos focuses on the long-term sediment dynamics of the Bügdüz catchment in the western part of the territory of Sagalassos.
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