In the current state of practice, any soil settlement other than consolidation settlement is often called elastic settlement. It is also referred to as immediate settlement in some geotechnical reports. The question is: which one of these terminologies is more appropriate and better represents the nature of soil deformations.

Unlike steel or aluminium, soil exhibits nonlinear plastic behavior immediately after application of external loads. If you load and unload a soft/loose soil specimen and plot the load-deflection curve, the unloading curve will not intersect the deflection axis at origin , i.e., (load=0.0, deformation=0.0). To this end, use of the term “elastic settlement” seems to be inappropriate. It is recommended to use the term “immediate settlement” instead. Immediate settlement better represents elastoplastic deformation of soils which is time independent and occurs immediately after loading.