Pedology
/pɪˈdɒlədʒi/noun
The branch of soil science concerned with how soils form, how they are classified, and how they sit in the landscape.
The Greek roots
Literally: “study of the soil”
The story of the word
Two unrelated Greek words collide in English here. Soil pedology comes from πέδον, ground, while the pedology that means the study of children comes from παῖς, παιδός, child, and pedal comes from Latin pes, foot. Soil scientists increasingly say pedology only in print and dig their trenches without arguing about it. The discipline itself was built by Vasily Dokuchaev in Russia in the 1880s, who showed that soil is a body with a history rather than crushed rock.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
Same family
In a sentence
Pedology explains why two fields a hundred metres apart drain completely differently.
She moved from geology into pedology after a summer mapping profiles.