chernozem means A fertile black soil containing a very high percentage of humus (3% to 15%) and high percentages of phosphoric acids, phosphorus and ammonia. Lexicurio rates it Sui generis — a strength score of 85 out of 100.
Why this word is great
CHERNOZEM — [Noun] A fertile black soil rich in humus, characteristic of cool or temperate semiarid grasslands. From Russian чернозём (chernozyom), from чёрный (chyornyy, "black") + земля́ (zemlyá, "earth, soil"). Unlike loam—a general, amiable mixture of sand, silt, and clay—or podzol—an infertile, ash-gray leachate of northern forests—chernozem is a specific, profound historical archive of fecundity. It is the crumbling, velvety clod that parts like cake beneath the plough; the fathomless horizon underpinning endless grain seas; the deep, quiet bank account of carbon drawn from millennia of grass dying into itself. This is earth with a memory—a black archive of all that has been, now sustaining all that will be.
noun
- A fertile black soil containing a very high percentage of humus (3% to 15%) and high percentages of phosphoric acids, phosphorus and ammonia.“The experiments made by the beet-root growers of the extensive tract of land in Russia, known as the Tschernosem or 'Black soil', whose fertility for corn plants is proverbial, show that this earth, though analytically proved to contain upon the whole, to the depth of twenty inches, 700 to 1000 times the quantity of potash required for a full beet-root crop, is, after three or four years' cultivat”