castings
n.pl.— «The worm’s waste materials, delicately referred to as “castings,” or, indelicately, as “poop,” are eaten by microbes and fungi, allowing them to grow and reproduce and sequester minerals from the soil.» —“Vessels of the Holy Spirit or Agents of Entropy?” by ArchaicFuturist Young Anabaptist Radicals May 11, 2007. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Books were rare treasures in the Middle Ages, painstakingly copied out by hand. So how to protect them from theft? Scribes sometimes added a curse to the first page of those books that was supposed to keep thieves away — and some were as vicious as...
What’s the word for the smell of rain? It’s petrichor. For years, scientists referred to this evidence of rain as argillaceous odor because it was particularly noticeable near soil with a lot of whitish clay called argil. Then, in the early 1960s...