clayey

adj

1. Composed of clay or containing (much) clay; clayish.

   “The shores of the rivers and creeks are chiefly planted with coffee, to the distance of about 30 miles from the sea; thence 30 miles farther up, the soil becomes clayey and more fit for sugar[-]canes.”

   “I was myself very successful in one beautiful group of insects, the tiger-beetles, which seem more abundant and varied here than anywhere else in the Archipelago. I first met with them on a cutting in the road, where a hard clayey bank was partially overgrown with mosses and small ferns.”

   “She had walked over rotted, decaying, splintered planks covered with clayey soil: […]”

   “Limestone, of course, is calcium carbonate, and thus chemically utterly different in composition from the clayey rocks below and the hard, pebbly ones above.”

2. Covered or dirtied with clay.

   “Wheat-fields, one would think, cannot come to grow untilled; no man made clayey, or made weary thereby;—unless machinery will do it?”

3. Resembling clay; claylike, clayish.

   “Death, grim Death, will fold / Me, in his leaden Arms, and preſs me cloſe / To his cold clayie Breaſt: […]”

4. (figuratively)Of the human body, as contrasted with the soul; bodily, human, mortal.

   “This purifing of wit, this enritching of memory, enabling of iudgment, and enlarging of conceyt, which commonly we call learning, […] the final end is, to lead and draw vs to as high a perfection, as our degenerate ſoules made worſe by their clayey lodgings, can be capable of.”

   “[A]mid these tombs, / Cold as their clayey tenants, know, my heart / Must never grow to stone!”

   “To low estate of clayey creature, / See, I bring the beggar's meed, / Nutriment beyond the need!”

   “[W]hen between sheets, whether by day or by night, and whether asleep or awake, I have a way of always keeping my eyes shut, in order the more to concentrate the snugness of being in bed. Because no man can ever feel his own identity aright except his eyes be closed; as if, darkness were indeed the proper element of our essences, though light be more congenial to our clayey part.”