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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
sleuth
noun
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ After the accusation, they are worried-sick parents, small-town pariahs, amateur lawyers, sometime sleuths, etc.
▪ But for once, the gentleman sleuth left home for the bright lights.
▪ By the same date the Recruit case sleuths should have completed their investigations.
▪ Few of us would consider the possibility that the information has been obtained through the services of a psychic sleuth.
▪ He has his sleuth say once that to commit a murder you need four aces.
▪ The sleuths are in more danger with every discovery they make.
▪ What his sleuths seek are truths that everybody else knows already, or is afraid to know.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Sleuth

Sleuth \Sleuth\, n. [Icel. sl[=o][eth]. See Slot a track.] The track of man or beast as followed by the scent. [Scot.]
--Halliwell.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
sleuth

c.1200, "track or trail of a person," from Old Norse sloð "trail," of uncertain origin. Meaning "detective" is 1872, shortening of sleuth-hound "keen investigator" (1849), a figurative use of a word that dates back to late 14c. meaning a kind of bloodhound. The verb (intransitive) meaning "to act as a detective, investigate" is recorded from 1905. Related: Sleuthed; sleuthing.

Wiktionary
sleuth

Etymology 1 n. 1 (context obsolete English) An animal’s trail or track. 2 (context archaic English) A sleuth-hound; a bloodhound. 3 A detective. vb. (context intransitive transitive English) To act as a detective; to try to discover who committed a crime. Etymology 2

n. 1 (context obsolete uncountable English) slowness; laziness, sloth. 2 (context rare English) A collective term for a group of bears.

WordNet
sleuth
  1. n. a detective who follows a trail [syn: sleuthhound]

  2. v. watch, observe, or inquire secretly [syn: spy, stag, snoop]

Wikipedia
Sleuth (1972 film)

Sleuth is a 1972 British mystery thriller film directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz and starring Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine. The screenplay by playwright Anthony Shaffer was based on his 1970 Tony Award-winning homonymous play. Both Olivier and Caine were nominated for an Academy Award for their performance. This was Mankiewicz's final film. Critics gave the film overwhelmingly positive reviews, and would later note similarities between it and Caine's 1982 film Deathtrap.

Sleuth

Sleuth may refer to:

  • Detective
  • Sleuth, collective noun for a group of bears
Sleuth (play)

__NOTOC__ Sleuth is a 1970 play written by Anthony Shaffer. The play is set in the Wiltshire manor house of Andrew Wyke, an immensely successful mystery writer. Wyke's home reflects his obsession with the inventions and deceptions of fiction and his fascination with games and game-playing. He lures his wife's lover, Milo Tindle, to the house and convinces him to stage a robbery of her jewellery, a proposal that sets off a chain of events that leaves the audience trying to decipher where Wyke's imagination ends and reality begins.

Shaffer said the play was partially inspired by one of his friends, composer Stephen Sondheim, whose intense interest in game-playing is mirrored by the character of Wyke.

The play's first production, starring Anthony Quayle and Keith Baxter, was at London's St Martin's Theatre.

After four previews, the Broadway production, with Quayle and Baxter directed by Clifford Williams, opened on 9 November 1970 at the Music Box Theatre, where it ran for 1,222 performances. When Anthony Quayle left the production in 1972, Patrick Macnee replaced him in the role of Wyke.

Sleuth (2007 film)

Sleuth is a 2007 thriller film directed by Kenneth Branagh and starring Jude Law and Michael Caine. The screenplay by Harold Pinter is an adaptation of Anthony Shaffer's Tony Award-winning play Sleuth. Caine had previously starred in a 1972 version, where he played Law's role against Laurence Olivier.

Sleuth (video game)

Sleuth is a text-based " whodunit" video game created by Eric N. Miller of Norland Software (now defunct). It was first released in 1983.

Usage examples of "sleuth".

Perhaps in some humble corner of such a Valhalla, Sherlock and his Watson may for a time find a place, while some more astute sleuth with some even less astute comrade may fill the stage which they have vacated.

The Lemon Drop Kid is so busy all afternoon thinking of the injustice of the sleuths that he never even bothers to look up this particular race beforehand, and afterward he is quite generally criticized for slovenliness in this matter, for if a guy is around telling the tale about a race, he is entitled to pick out a horse that has at least some kind of a chance.

With the keenest of sleuths in our detective departments of the North, and with courts and juries of unimpeachable integrity, crime stalks boldly in its greatest cities, and arrogant corruption goes unwhipt of justice.

An underpaid sleuth with a cubby-hole and a nightstick and a remit to keep one eye on the shifty characters who walked in off the street and an even beadier eye on the dodgy ones who worked there.

Such heightened sensitivity as compensation for blindness was used earlier by the British author Ernest Bramah, who created the blind detective Max Carrados, and later by the American writer Baynard Kendrick, whose sightless sleuth was Captain Duncan Maclain.

Sleuth home earlier than she expected, she went to the corner where the chiffonnier stood, and, exerting the whole of her not very great physical strength, she tipped forward the heavy piece of furniture.

This calm-faced personage had come to the Club Janeiro for the same purpose as Commissioner Weston and his band of sleuths.

For three years on that most sensational of the New York dailies he had been the star man, the chief muckraker, the chief sleuth.

In addition to Doan and Carstairs, he created such series sleuths as Ben Shaley, Doc Flame, Bail Bond Dodd, the fudge, Jim Daniels, and another brilliantly screwball private eye, Max Latin.

So The Lemon Drop Kid puts the C note in his pants pocket, and walks around and about until the horses are going to the post, and you must not think there is anything dishonest in his not betting this money with a bookmaker, as The Lemon Drop Kid is only taking the bet himself, which is by no means unusual, and in fact it is so common that only guys like Cap Duhaine and his sleuths think much about it.

The General had regaled Holmes and myself with stories of his quite illustrious career on several occasions after the sleuth had recovered his daughter's famous pendant of Ceylonese rubies.

They collaborated on what came to be The Roman Hat Mystery, using a very sophisticated young man named Ellery Queen as a mystery writer and amateur sleuth.

Chief Collig rose, strode around the desk, and clapped each of the young sleuths on the shoulder.

Once again the young sleuths took out the two instruction sheets for the Hugo dummies and began to compare them.

Then some of Cap Duhaine's sleuths come running up and they take after The Lemon Drop Kid too, and he has to have plenty of early foot to beat them to the racetrack gates, and while Rarus P.