slug
/slʌɡ/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.31 in modern English
5
Scrabble Score
4
Letters
1
Syllables
4
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
A bullet or other projectile fired from a firearm; in modern usage, generally refers to a shotgun slug.
noun
A counterfeit coin, especially one used to steal from vending machines.
noun
A title, name or header, a catchline, a short phrase or title to indicate the content of a newspaper or magazine story for editing use.
noun
The imperial (English) unit of mass that accelerates by 1 foot per second squared (1 ft/s²) when a force of one pound-force (lbf) is exerted on it.
Example Sentences
- "[…] all our Ammunition was spent. Those of us who had Money made Slugs of it; their next Shift was to take the middle Screws out of their Guns, and charge their Pieces with them."
- "A mass accelerator propels a solid metal slug using precisely-controlled electromagnetic attraction and repulsion. The slug is designed to squash or shatter on impact, increasing the energy it transfers to the target. If this were not the case, it would simply punch a hole right through, doing minimal damage."
- "The average slug has a mass of around 0.00002 slugs."
- "The slug is defined as the mass which would accelerate at a rate of 1 ft/s² under a force of one pound-force (lbf). Since 1 lbf is the force exerted on a mass of one pound by a standard gravitational field (of exactly 9.80665 meters per square second), a slug is thus exactly equal to 196133/6096 pounds (about 32.1740485564 lb or 14.593902937206 kg)."
- "This is perhaps best done by considering a unit cell consisting of one bubble and part of the liquid slugs on each side of it…"
- "When these layers are recovered they inevitably result in a slug of sawdust which goes into the digester and tends to plug the screens in a Kamyr digester."
Etymology
Originally referred to a slow, lazy person, from Middle English slugge (“lazy person", also "sloth, slothfulness”), probably of either Old English or Old Norse origin; perhaps ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *sliǵ-ōn, from *sley- (“smooth; slick; sticky; slimy”) or otherwise from the root of Old Norse slókr (“lazy person, oaf”), whence Icelandic slókur (“laziness”). Compare Norn slug (“lazy, slothful, sluggish”), dialectal Norwegian slugg (“a large, heavy body”), sluggje (“heavy, slow person”), Danish slog (“rascal, rogue”). Compare also Dutch slak (“snail, slug”). Doublet of slotch. The sense of a hitchhiking commuter is from the sense of a counterfeit bus token. Bus operators considered sluggers to be cheating as if they were using counterfeit tokens.
Origin
Word Breakdown
- Root: slugge, -, *slagiz
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /slʌɡ/
- British English: /slʌɡ/