loess

plural loesses · alternative löss

1. countableuncountablegeographyAny sediment, dominated by silt, of eolian (wind-blown) origin.

   The Yellow River got its name from the massive amount of fertile loess (yellow earth) which it has deposited in the wheat-growing North China Plain.

   1987, Amy Shui, Stuart Thompson, “China and its people”, in Chinese Food and Drink, Wayland Publishers, →ISBN, →OCLC, page 4, column 2

   2 more examples

   The Yellow River—the “Sorrow of China”—comes down from the loess hills into the great plain of China on a gently sloping fan. The river has two possible outlets to the sea, the one north of the Shantung Peninsula into the Gulf of Chihli, the other some hundreds of miles to the south of the Peninsula.

   1951, Herbert Hoover, “Engineering in China 1899–1902”, in The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover, Years of Adventure 1874–1920, New York: Macmillan Company, →OCLC, →OL, page 45

   They blast their sand westwards across the steppe, coating the foothills of the Brooks Range in an icing-sugar dust of the loose, windblown sand-silt mixture known as loess.

   2022, Thomas Halliday, Otherworlds, Penguin, published 2023, page 3

plural LOESSes

1. abbreviationacronymmathematicsAcronym of locally estimated scatterplot smoothing.

   Locally weighted regression, or loess, is a procedure for fitting a regression surface to data through multivariate smoothing.

   1986, William S. Cleveland and Susan J. Delvin, “Locally Weighted Regression: An Approach to Regression Analysis by Local Fitting”, in Journal of the American Statistical Association, volume 83, number 403, page 596