Entisols have no diagnostic horizons, and are unaltered from their parent material, which could be unconsolidated sediment, or rock.
Entisols are the most common soils, occupying about 16% of the global ice-free land area.
Because of the diversity of their properties, suborders of entisols form individual Reference Soil Groups in the World Reference Base for Soil Resources (WRB): psamments correlate with arenosols, and fluvents with fluvisols.
Entisols are common in the paleopedological record ever since the Silurian; however, unlike other soil orders (oxisol, ultisol, gelisol, etc) they do not have value as indicators of climate.
Orthents may, in some cases, be indicative of an extremely ancient landscape with very little soil formation (i.e., Australia today).