slidder, slippery. The Pardoner and the Frere, in Hazlitt’s Dodsley, i. 213; ‘My tongue is grown sae slip and slidder’, Stuart, Joco-serious Discourse (ed. 1686, 20); see EDD. ME. slydyr, ‘lubricus’ (Prompt. EETS. 416); ‘A slidir mouth worchith fallyngis’, Wyclif, Prov. xxvi. 28. OE. slidor.
slidder, to slip, to slide. Dryden, tr. of Aeneid, ii. 749. In prov. use in Scotland and various parts of England (EDD.). OE. slid(e)rian, to slip.
slifter, a cleft or crack; ‘Fente, a cleft, rift, slifter, chinke’, Cotgrave. A north-country word (EDD.). Hence sliftered, cleft, rifted, Marston, Antonio, Pt. I, i. 1 (Antonio). Cp. G. (dial.) Schlifter, gully, watercourse.
slight; see [sleight].
slighten, to slight, depreciate. B. Jonson, Sejanus (end).
slip, a counterfeit coin. Often quibbled upon; as in Romeo, ii. 4. 51; Middleton, No Wit like a Woman’s, iii. 1 (Pickadill). See NED. (s.v. Slip, sb.4).
slipper, slippery. Othello, ii. 1. 246. A west-country word, see EDD. (s.v. Slipper, adj. 1). OE. slipor.
slipstring, a knave; one who has eluded the halter. Gascoigne, Supposes, iii. 1 (Dalio); ‘Goinfre, a wag, slipstring, knavish lad’, Cotgrave. In prov. use the word means an idle, worthless, slovenly person, so in Northants and Warw., see EDD. (s.v. Slip, 3, (22)).
slive, to slice, cleave; to strip off (a bough) by tearing it downward; ‘I slyue a floure from his braunche’, Palsgrave; ‘The boughes whereof . . . he cutting and sliving downe’, Warner, Alb. England, prose addition on Aeneid ii, § 1. In prov. use in various parts of England, see EDD. (s.v. Slive, vb.1 1). ME. slyvyn, a-sundyr, ‘findo’ (Prompt. EETS. 459). OE. (to)-slīfan, to split.
sliver, a small branch split off from the tree. Hamlet, iv. 7. 174. In gen. prov. use for a slice, a splinter of wood (EDD.). ME. slivere, a piece cut or split off (Chaucer, Tr. and Cr. iii. 1013).