Onlap

noun, verb

noun, verb ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    The phenomenon of successively younger rock strata extending progressively further across an erosion surface cut in older rocks.

    "Displacement on F3 was followed by continued accumulation and onlap of the fine-grained sands of unit 3 on the footwall and development of soil Qb2."

Verb
  1. 1
    To form an onlap.

    "Elsewhere, many of the youngest volcanic plains units onlap tesserae at crustal plateau boundaries."

Synonyms

All synonyms
overlapoverlap

Antonyms

All antonyms
offlap

Example

More examples

"Displacement on F3 was followed by continued accumulation and onlap of the fine-grained sands of unit 3 on the footwall and development of soil Qb2."

Etymology

From on + lap.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.