Soil

How to spell soil

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce soil

What does soil mean?

1. nounThe top layer of earth in which plants grow.
2. verbTo make something dirty, especially by staining it.

Soil in a sentence

• noun

  The gardener tested the soil before planting the vegetables.

• verb

  Careless handling can soil the white tablecloth in seconds.

• noun

  Heavy rain washed the fertile soil down the hillside.

• verb

  Workers wore aprons so the grease would not soil their clothes.

Where does soil come from?

Language of origin: French

The noun 'soil' arrived in English in the early 1300s through Anglo-Norman French, where 'soil' or 'sueil' meant the ground or floor. Its background is tangled: the form was influenced by the Latin 'solium', meaning a seat or throne, but its 'ground' sense really leans on the very similar Latin 'solum', which literally meant the bottom, the base, or the earth underfoot. Over time the English word settled firmly on the meaning of earth in which plants grow. The verb 'soil', meaning to make dirty, comes from a separate source, the Old French 'soillier', 'to wallow' or 'to make muddy', traced back to a Latin word for a wallowing pig (linked to 'sus', meaning pig). The two words look identical today, which is why a single short spelling carries both the clean idea of farmland and the messy idea of staining something.

How the word is built

• soil (a single, unanalysable root noun/verb; no prefix or suffix)