slime
/slaɪm/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.38 in modern English
7
Scrabble Score
5
Letters
1
Syllables
5
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
Soft, moist earth or clay, having an adhesive quality; viscous mud; any substance of a dirty nature, that is moist, soft, and adhesive; bitumen; mud containing metallic ore, obtained in the preparatory dressing.
Countable; Uncountable
Example Sentences
- "As it [the Nile] ebbs, the seedsman / Upon the slime and ooze scatters his grain."
- "You ſhould rub your Teeth and whole Mouth and Gums, the Pallate and Tongue, with a clean courſe cloth, rubbing off the ſlime which groweth upon them in the night."
- ""What about that, you slime?""
- "If this guy knows who killed Robert, the right thing to do is to tell the police. If he doesn't know, really, then he's an opportunistic slime. It's still blackmail."
- "This is a nameless blue slime, drawn by Chris Hildenbrand, for a role playing game (RPG) that was never released."
- "[…] th'eternall Lord in fleshly slime / Enwombed was, from wretched Adams line / To purge away the guilt of sinfull crime […]"
Etymology
Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *sley- Proto-Germanic *slīmą Old English slīm English slime From Middle English slime, slyme, slim, slym, from Old English slīm, from Proto-West Germanic *slīm, from Proto-Germanic *slīmą, from Proto-Indo-European *sley- (“smooth; slick; sticky; slimy”). Cognates include Saterland Frisian Sliem, Dutch slijm, German Schleim (“mucus, slime”), Danish, Norwegian Bokmål, and Norwegian Nynorsk slim, Swedish slem, Faroese and Icelandic slím (“slime”), Latin limus (“mud”), Ancient Greek λίμνη (límnē, “marsh”). The slang sense of "to murder" spread among Black communites throughout the 2010s and gained prominence on TikTok around 2021.
Origin
Word Breakdown
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /slaɪm/
- British English: /slaɪm/