Soil science

Der Podsol is one of the few soil names on this list that German borrowed rather than built, and the loan describes exactly what a spade uncovers. It comes from Russian, where pod means under and zola means ash: beneath a thin dark layer of litter and humus lies a band of pale grey sand that looks as though ash had been worked into it. Rainwater draining through acid heath or pine litter has stripped iron and humus out of that band and carried them down, and where they settle again they can cement into der Ortstein, hard enough to stop roots and spades alike. German had a descriptive name of its own, die Bleicherde, bleached earth, yet soil classification uses the Russian word, just as it writes der Tschernosem for what everyday German calls die Schwarzerde. English usually spells the first one with a z; German keeps the s.