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Definition of "silt" [silt]

  • A sedimentary material consisting of very fine particles intermediate in size between sand and clay. (noun)
  • To become filled with silt: an old channel that silted up. (verb-intransitive)
  • To fill, cover, or obstruct with silt: River sediments gradually silted the harbor. (verb-transitive)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Use "silt" in a sentence
  • "When we first set up shop in a dusty film studio in Giza, which is the town next to Cairo, I found Dr. Sala on the back lot, aging some of our sets with silt from the Nile."
  • "You have loam and we have river bed sand and decomposed granite and perhaps silt from the river."
  • "On Mars, NASA's robot rover Spirit is spinning its wheels on the soft shoulder of planetary exploration, up to its axles in silt millions of miles away from tense engineers who are struggling to extricate it by remote control."