Illustrative Context

She let the sand fall through her hands.

Target Sense

• The most generic term for sand as a form of material — a mass of grains of rock, shell, mineral, etc. — so small and granular that individual grains are only just distinguishable to the naked eye, and as one would find prototypically in a desert or on a beach, most commonly yellowish in colour.
• In most languages this term will be a mass/non-count noun, and in order to refer to any one tiny grain of sand may require singulative morphology or a quantifier noun such as English grain in a grain of sand.
• Avoid narrower terms (and count nouns) that refer specifically to particular conformations of sand, i.e. terms for a (sandy) beach, dune, a place or surface covered with sand, e.g. French arène, etc..
• What in English is a distinct lexeme sand may in other languages co-lexify with other similar meanings. Enter, however, only the single lexeme in your language that is the default term in the basic vocabulary for the target prototypical sense as defined above, and would be used in the illustrative context (irrespective of what other wider senses it may also extend to). Do not enter any additional lexemes that more specifically correspond to different concepts (in English) such as dust, powder, ash, soot, silt, soil, dirt, mud, etc..
• So if your language does distinguish, for example, a separate lexeme for the sand-like material on a river-bed or river-banks, equivalent to English silt, then do not enter this as an additional lexeme; enter only the basic sand lexeme. The target term in English is sand alone, and none of the other English lexemes mentioned here.
• In the target sense here, sand prototypically does not contain significant organic matter and is not good for growing most plants in. Avoid terms more closely equivalent to soil, or that denote a soil type, even if with significant sand content, e.g. loess.
• Enter the most basic, default lexeme and avoid terms that are narrower in any sense, e.g. lexemes to distinguish:
  • Particular degrees of coarseness/fineness of grain size, e.g. course gravel.
  • Particular degrees of dryness/wetness of sand, e.g. quicksand.
  • Specific colours of sand.
• The target sense is the literal one of sand as a naturally occurring material. Avoid any additional lexemes that primarily represent extensions to figurative senses, e.g. sand as representing dryness, elusiveness, impermanence, an obstacle, the passage of time, etc..
• See also the definitions for the distinct IE-CoR meanings dust and ash.