The term pelitic or pelite is often applied to these sediments and rocks.

It is equivalent to the term mudstone and the Greek-derived term pelite.

Naming based on texture and a pelite (e.g., shale, mudrock) protolith can be used to define slate and phyllite.

Therefore a meta psammite and a meta pelite will have different mineralogical compositions even though they were in the same metamorphic facies.

Plancher-les-Mines, France (pelite)

The island is composed of gneiss and schist, with some quartzite and pelite while its landscape is one of rough grass and heather.

The protolith (or parent rock) for phyllite is shale or pelite, or slate, which in turn came from a shale protolith.

More commonly, metamorphic geologists currently use pelite for a metamorphosed fine-grained sedimentary rock, i.e. mudstone or siltstone, which should technically be called a metapelite.

The greenschist derives from mafic magmatic rocks like gabbro and basaltic pillow lava, basic volcanoclastics and rare intercalations of chert and pelite.

The term pelite is not to be confused with pilite, a rarely used name for an altered olivine that has partially pseudomorphically replaced by an assemblage of carbonate-chlorite-actinolite and can be identified only in a thin section.