Other forms: sediments
Sediment is the stuff that sinks. Leave a glass of river water on the table for an hour and a thin brown layer gathers at the bottom; that layer is sediment. The last inch of an old bottle of red wine has it too, which is why you pour the end slowly.
Outdoors the same word covers everything a river carries and then drops - sand, silt, mud, gravel - piling up in slow layers on a lake bed or spreading out across a delta. Pressed for millions of years, those layers harden into sedimentary rock, and that is where fossils are found. The process itself has its own noun, sedimentation. Treat sediment as a mass noun: sediment builds up, sediment settles, and the plural sediments belongs to scientific writing. In water treatment and winemaking it is the thing you are trying to separate out, not a fault in the liquid.
1nounsedimentSolid material that sinks to the bottom of a liquid and settles there.~2%
“Pour it slowly so the sediment stays in the bottle.”
2nounrockSand, mud and similar material carried by water or wind and dropped somewhere else.~98%
“The river drops most of its sediment where it meets the sea.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 13 sentences found in the wild and placed 13 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Sediment came through Middle French sediment from Latin sedimentum, formed on sedeo - the verb for sitting - and behind it the Proto-Indo-European root *sed-. Sediment is what has sat down. The same root is still sitting inside sedentary.
Proto-Indo-European
*sed-
Latin
sedimentum
Middle French
sédiment
English, today
sediment
From Middle French sédiment, from Latin sedimentum < sedeō.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA