Sediment

How to spell sediment

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce sediment

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does sediment mean?

1. nounSolid matter that settles to the bottom of a liquid, or material deposited by water, wind, or ice.

Sediment in a sentence

• A thick layer of sediment had collected at the bottom of the wine bottle.

• The river carried fine sediment downstream and left it across the floodplain.

Where does sediment come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes from the Latin sedimentum, which meant a settling or a sinking down, and was built directly on the verb sedere, meaning 'to sit'. The idea is intuitive: particles suspended in a liquid eventually sit at the bottom, just as a person sits down to rest. English borrowed the word in the sixteenth century, first in scientific and geological contexts describing matter that settles out of water. The very same sedere root sits quietly inside many familiar English words, including 'sediment', 'reside', 'sedentary', and even 'session'. Knowing that the middle of the word is essentially the 'sit' root, sed-i-ment, helps fix the spelling, since the unstressed middle vowel is exactly where writers tend to slip.

How the word is built

• sedi- (from Latin sedere: to sit, to settle)
• -ment (noun suffix denoting a result or product)