Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun Soil composed of a mixture of sand, clay, silt, and organic matter.
- noun A mixture of moist clay and sand, and often straw, used especially in making bricks and foundry molds.
- transitive verb To fill, cover, or coat with loam.
from The Century Dictionary.
- To cover or coat with loam; clay.
- noun A soil consisting of a natural mixture of clay and sand, the latter being present in sufficient quantity to overcome the tendency of the clay to form a coherent mass.
- noun In founding, a mixture of sand, clay, sawdust, straw, etc., used in making the molds for castings. The compound must be plastic when wet, and hard, air-tight, and able to resist high temperatures when dry. Specifically called
casting-loam . - noun A vessel of clay; an earthen vessel.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- intransitive verb To cover, smear, or fill with loam.
- noun A kind of soil; an earthy mixture of clay and sand, with organic matter to which its fertility is chiefly due.
- noun (Founding) A mixture of sand, clay, and other materials, used in making molds for large castings, often without a pattern.
- noun (Founding) a mold made with loam. See
Loam , n., 2. - noun the process or business of making loam molds.
- noun an iron plate upon which a section of a loam mold rests, or from which it is suspended.
- noun loam molding or loam molds.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun A kind of
soil ; an earthy mixture ofclay andsand , with organic matter to which its fertility is chiefly due. - verb To cover, smear, or fill with loam.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun a rich soil consisting of a mixture of sand and clay and decaying organic materials
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
Support
Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word loam.
Examples
-
The term loam is applied to a soil which, from its appearance in the field and the feeling when handled, appears to be about one-half sand and the other half silt and clay with more or less organic matter.
The First Book of Farming Charles Landon Goodrich
-
It's the top spit that puzzles us, and loam is the most important thing of all.
-
Ash of the loam was a lady at home when Brut was an outlaw man
Archive 2006-11-01 ambermoggie 2006
-
Ash of the loam was a lady at home when Brut was an outlaw man
Lost road through the woods,oak ash and thorn ambermoggie 2006
-
In early fall I get together a pile of fresh sod loam, that is, the top spit from a pasture field, but do not add any manure to it.
Mushrooms: how to grow them a practical treatise on mushroom culture for profit and pleasure William Falconer
-
The loam is the ordinary field soil from his market garden.
Mushrooms: how to grow them a practical treatise on mushroom culture for profit and pleasure William Falconer
-
The clay wherewith our houses are impannelled is either white, red, or blue; and of these the first doth participate very much of the nature of our chalk; the second is called loam; but the third eftsoons changeth colour as soon as it is wrought, notwithstanding that it looks blue when it is thrown out of the pit.
Chronicle and Romance (The Harvard Classics Series) Thomas Malory Jean Froissart
-
We can easily see that the melting away of the immense glaciers that we have been describing would produce vast floods in the rivers, and it is perhaps owing to the presence of such swollen rivers that are due the great beds of surface soil, called loam or loess, found in all the river valleys of France and Germany.
The Prehistoric World; or, Vanished races Emory Adams Allen
-
The soil is a rich sandy loam, that is easily cultivated and gives promise of great agricultural and horticultural possibilities.
The Choctaw Freedmen and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy Robert Elliott Flickinger
-
The clay wherewith our houses are impannelled is either white, red, or blue; and of these the first doth participate very much of the nature of our chalk; the second is called loam; but the third eftsoons changeth colour as soon as it is wrought, notwithstanding that it looks blue when it is thrown out of the pit.
ofravens commented on the word loam
Loam-humps, he says, moles shunt
up from delved worm-haunt
from "Ode for Ted," Sylvia Plath
April 14, 2008