Home › Words › S › schistschist/ʃɪst/schist means any of a variety of coarse-grained crystalline metamorphic rocks with a foliated structure that allows easy division into slabs or slates.schist is pronounced /ʃɪst/.EtymologyFrom French schiste, from Latin schistos lapis (“the stone that is easy to split”), from Ancient Greek σχιστός (skhistós, “splittable”), from σχίζω (skhízō, “to split”).nounAny of a variety of coarse-grained crystalline metamorphic rocks with a foliated structure that allows easy division into slabs or slates.e.g.“Although it shows under the microscope traces of the original gabbro structure and of the original gabbro minerals, no one would hesitate from a microscopical examination to class it with the schists.” — 1890, George Huntington Williams, “The Greenstone Schist Areas of the Menominee and Marquette Regions of Michigan”, in US Geological Survey, number 62, page 74:Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).