slow
/sloʊ/
Word Rarity
Uncommon
Frequency: Zipf frequency 4.85 in modern English
7
Scrabble Score
4
Letters
1
Syllables
4
Unique Chars
Meaning
adj
Taking a long time to move or go a short distance, or to perform an action; not quick in motion; proceeding at a low speed.
adj
Not happening in a short time; spread over a comparatively long time.
adj
Lacking spirit; deficient in liveliness or briskness.
Example Sentences
- "a slow train; a slow computer"
- "Turkey should always be cooked in a slow oven."
- "Holding out her small olive hand before her captain, she said in mild and slowest Spanish, "Senor, I buried him;" then paused, struggled as against the writhed coilings of a snake, and cringing suddenly, leaped up, repeating in impassioned pain, "I buried him, my life, my soul!""
- "Dotcom mania was slow in coming to higher education, but now it has the venerable industry firmly in its grip. Since the launch early last year of Udacity and Coursera, two Silicon Valley start-ups offering free education through MOOCs, massive open online courses, the ivory towers of academia have been shaken to their foundations."
- "Theſe changes in the Heav’ns, though ſlow, produc’d / Like change on Sea and Land, ſideral blaſt, / Vapour, and Miſt, and Exhalation hot, / Corrupt and Peſtilent: […]"
- "Similar studies of rats have employed four different intracranial resorbable, slow sustained release systems—surgical foam, a thermal gel depot, a microcapsule or biodegradable polymer beads."
Etymology
From Middle English slaw, slow, from Old English slāw (“lazy; inert, slow”), from Proto-West Germanic *slaiw, from Proto-Germanic *slaiwaz (“blunt; dull; exhausted, faint, sluggish, weak, weary; listless, torpid; dim-witted, slow; lazy, slack”), possibly from Proto-Indo-European *sleyH-u- (“bad”). Cognates Cognate with Dutch slee, sleeuw (“cramped, stiff; blunt; sour”), Danish sløv (“blunt; dull; apathetic, lethargic, listless, sluggish, torpid; drowsy”), Icelandic sljór (“dim-witted; blunt; jaded”), Norwegian Nynorsk sljo, slø, sløv (“blunt; weak; lazy”), Swedish slö (“dull; lazy, lethargic, slow, sluggish”).
Origin
Word Breakdown
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /sloʊ/
- British English: /sləʊ/
Usage
Inflected Forms
Derived Forms
Phrases
Frequently Paired Words
move slowly
forslow