slake
/sleɪk/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 2.01 in modern English
9
Scrabble Score
5
Letters
1
Syllables
5
Unique Chars
Meaning
Example Sentences
- "slake the heavenly fire"
- "It could not slake mine ire nor ease my heart."
- "Tyrian garbs, / Neptunian Albion's high teſtaceous food [i.e., oysters], / And flavour'd Chian wines with incenſe fum'd / To ſlake Patrician thirſt: for theſe, their rights / In the vile ſtreets they proſtitute to ſale; / Their ancient rights, their dignities, their laws, / Their native glorious freedom."
- "Tarzan went to the brook first, and slaked his thirst. Then he approached his cabin."
- "The booths of the publicans gazed shamelessly at the sun, with two empty porter barrels as supports at their doors, ready to smile at their clients with their seductive roundness, ready to lure the thirsty islanders into the gloomy recesses beneath the canvas, where Mulligan's assistant or Mrs Moroney's assistant would hand out frothy pints of porter and glistening tumblers of whisky to slake the thirst and set the blood tingling."
- "In that study, some of the subjects had dreams in which they were slaking their thirst, very much like the dreams of convenience Freud described."
Etymology
From Middle English slaken (“to render slack, to slake”), from Old English sleacian, from Old English slæc (“slack”). Unrelated to, but possibly influenced by, the Old Norse sløkkva (“to extinguish”), compare Swedish släcka in the phrase släcka sin törst (“quench one's thirst”), släcka elden (“put out the fire”), and släckt kalk (“slaked lime”).
Origin
Word Breakdown
Regional Pronunciation
- British English: /sleɪk/