A geological term describing rock that is fissured or tending to split along certain directions, possibly related to shale formations.
Possibly from 'chert' or 'chay' (referring to stone types), with the suffix '-y' meaning 'having the quality of.' This is a technical geological term with uncertain origins.
This obscure geological term shows how specialized vocabularies develop in technical fields—geologists needed precise words to describe rock behaviors, so they created terms that might never appear outside a geology textbook.
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