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sloth
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
sloth
noun
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ Workers could be punished for incompetence or sloth.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ I have to tell the right hon. Gentleman that indolence, sloth and complacency are not enough.
▪ I suggest to him that he should overcome his natural sloth and complacency.
▪ It is not sloth that prevents me from doing my duty, being a grown-up and throwing out the tree.
▪ The rest, as automatically, were punished for their incompetence or sloth.
▪ To intense, hardworking young Taylor, the practice could scarcely have seemed like anything but the most shameless sloth.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Sloth

Sloth \Sloth\, n. [OE. slouthe, sleuthe, AS. sl?w?, fr. sl[=a]w slow. See Slow.]

  1. Slowness; tardiness.

    These cardinals trifle with me; I abhor This dilatory sloth and tricks of Rome.
    --Shak.

  2. Disinclination to action or labor; sluggishness; laziness; idleness.

    [They] change their course to pleasure, ease, and sloth.
    --Milton.

    Sloth, like rust, consumes faster than labor wears.
    --Franklin.

  3. (Zo["o]l.) Any one of several species of arboreal edentates constituting the family Bradypodid[ae], and the suborder Tardigrada. They have long exserted limbs and long prehensile claws. Both jaws are furnished with teeth (see Illust. of Edentata), and the ears and tail are rudimentary. They inhabit South and Central America and Mexico.

    Note: The three-toed sloths belong to the genera Bradypus and Arctopithecus, of which several species have been described. They have three toes on each foot. The best-known species are collared sloth ( Bradypus tridactylus), and the ai ( Arctopitheus ai). The two-toed sloths, consisting the genus Cholopus, have two toes on each fore foot and three on each hind foot. The best-known is the unau ( Cholopus didactylus) of South America. See Unau. Another species ( C. Hoffmanni) inhabits Central America. Various large extinct terrestrial edentates, such as Megatherium and Mylodon, are often called sloths.

    Australian sloth, or Native sloth (Zo["o]l.), the koala.

    Sloth animalcule (Zo["o]l.), a tardigrade.

    Sloth bear (Zo["o]l.), a black or brown long-haired bear ( Melursus ursinus, or Melursus labiatus), native of India and Ceylon; -- called also aswail, labiated bear, and jungle bear. It is easily tamed and can be taught many tricks.

    Sloth monkey (Zo["o]l.), a loris.

Sloth

Sloth \Sloth\, v. i. To be idle. [Obs.]
--Gower.

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Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
sloth

late 12c., "indolence, sluggishness," formed from Middle English slou, slowe (see slow (adj.)) + abstract formative -th (2). Replaced Old English slæwð "sloth, indolence." Sense of "slowness, tardiness" is from mid-14c. As one of the deadly sins, it translates Latin accidia.\n

\nThe slow-moving mammal first so called 1610s, a translation of Portuguese preguiça "slowness, slothfulness," from Latin pigritia "laziness" (compare Spanish perezosa "slothful," also "the sloth").

Wiktionary
sloth

n. 1 (context uncountable English) laziness; slowness in the mindset; disinclination to action or labour. 2 (context countable English) A herbivorous, arboreal South American mammal of the families Megalonychidae and Bradypodidae, noted for its slowness and inactivity. 3 (context rare English) A collective term for a group of bear. vb. (context obsolete intransitive English) To be idle.

Related phrases:
WordNet
sloth

  1. n. a disinclination to work or exert yourself [syn: slothfulness]

  2. any of several slow-moving arboreal mammals of South America and Central America; they hang from branches back downward and feed on leaves and fruits [syn: tree sloth]

  3. apathy and inactivity in the practice of virtue (personified as one of the deadly sins) [syn: laziness, acedia]

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Wikipedia
Sloth (deadly sin)

Sloth is one of the seven deadly sins. It is the most difficult sin to define, and to credit as sin, since it refers to a peculiar jumble of notions, dating from antiquity and including mental, spiritual, pathological, and physical states. One definition that may be given to sloth is habitual disinclination to exertion.

Views concerning the need for one to work to support society and further God's plan and work also suggest that, through inactivity, one invites the desire to sin. "For Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do." ("Against Idleness and Mischief" by Isaac Watts).

In the Philokalia, the word dejection is used instead of sloth, for the person who falls into dejection will lose interest in life. Laziness is considered unbecoming in many traditional customs. The demon Belphegor is often associated with sloth.

It is also one of the five hindrances in Buddhism.

Sloth (comics)

Sloth is a graphic novel by American cartoonist Gilbert Hernandez, published by Vertigo (DC Comics) in 2006. The story opens with the teenaged Miguel Serra awakening from a year-long coma. The surreal tale unravels as its protagonists delve into the legends of the sleepy suburban town they live in. The book is unrelated to Hernandez's Palomar stories.

Sloth (disambiguation)

A sloth is a mammal of the American rainforests, named after the deadly sin.

Sloth may also refer to:

  • Sloth (deadly sin), laziness, one of the seven deadly sins
  • Sloth (Fullmetal Alchemist), a manga and anime character
  • Ground sloth, an extinct American mammal
  • Sloth, a deformed man in The Goonies
  • Sloth, a graphic novel by Gilbert Hernandez
  • "Sloth", a song by Saint Vitus from Die Healing
  • "Sloth", a song by Fairport Convention from Full House
  • "The Sloth", a song by Phish from The Man Who Stepped into Yesterday
  • "Sloths!", a SNL Digital Short
  • SLOTH attack (Security Losses from Obsolete and Truncated Transcript Hashes), a crypto attack on MD5 signatures (CVE-2015-7575)
Sloth

Sloths are mammals classified in the families Megalonychidae (two-toed sloths) and Bradypodidae (three-toed sloths), including six extant species. They are named after the capital sin of sloth because they seem slow and lazy at first glance; however, their usual idleness is due to metabolic adaptations for conserving energy. Aside from their surprising speed during emergency flights from predators, other notable traits of sloths include their strong body and their ability to host symbiotic algae on their furs.

They are classified in the order Pilosa because they are related to anteaters, which sport a similar set of specialized claws. Extinct sloth species include many megafaunal ground sloths, some of which attained the size of elephants, as well as a few species of marine sloths. Extant sloths are medium-sized arboreal (tree-dwelling) residents of the jungles of Central and South America.

Sloths make good habitats for other organisms, and a single sloth may be home to moths, beetles, cockroaches, fungi, ciliates, and algae.

Related phrases:

Usage examples of "sloth".

When by the breath of flowers I am beguiled From sense of pain, and lulled in odorous sloth.

Apparently, the giant ground sloth and the short-faced grizzly also dwelt in the forests and plains along with the humpless camel, the mammoth, and the mastodon.

And, if the truth be told, Bass, the anti-Rome sentiment of the English people began at that time, through the preachments of these commoner-priests-cum-prelates against the sloth, indolence, money grubbing and posturings of the Church hierarchy.

And here was a solitary barylambda, a clumsy creature like a ground sloth with powerfully muscled legs and a stubby pointed tail.

He investigated, came shortly to a hole of some size, large enough to show him that it must be the home of some richh, bhalu, a common sloth or black bear.

One of the most spectacular pre-industrial extinction events was that of the Pleistocene megafauna -- the saber-toothed cats, mammoths, dire wolves, giant ground sloths, glyptodonts, and all those other animals familiar from museum dioramas.

Their guide, heartened by the good audience response, points out more funny trees - the dynamite tree, Hura crepitans, whose fruit explodes when it is ripe, and the very rare Cecropia of South America, the sloth tree, indeed the only mature Cecropia palmata in the United States, whose leaves have the texture of chamois skin and never disintegrate.

Most of our birds and reptiles, and our lemurs, rhinos, orang-utans, mandrills, lion-tailed macaques, giraffes, anteaters, tigers, leopards, cheetahs, hyenas, zebras, Himalayan and sloth bears, Indian elephants and Nilgiri tahrs, among others, were in demand, but others, Elfie for example, were met with silence.

It also sounded to Charlotte like a pack of lies: a refusal to cooperate, or even to acknowledge the problem, whose pigheadedness would not have been out of place in the fake personality of a low-grade sloth.

Behind the demon came a horde of beasts--huge serpents, enormous crabs, scaled wurms, rhinos with metal horns, giant ground sloths fitted with claws and spikes, and a host of gibbering dementia creatures only dreamed in ruined minds.

Most of the civic poets were radicals of some kind or other, but one of the first and best was the Slavophil Ivan Aksakov, whose publicistic poems written in the forties and fifties, in which he calls the Russian intellectual to work and discipline, and inveighs against his Oblomov,and-Rudin ineffectiveness and sloth, are admirable for their unadorned and straightforward strength.

America, as it was the end of the mammoth and the mastodon and smilodon, the saber-toothed cat, and the huge ground sloth, except that at about the time the original bison vanished, a much smaller and better-adapted version developed in Asia and made its own long trek across a new bridge into America.

Yuuzhan Vong, looking faintly Jedi-like in a hooded cape over scarlet vonduun crab armor, made Borsk wait while he descended three hundred meters of stairs at the pace of a Dagobah swamp sloth.

There are nonsentient animals on the planet, and we assumed chucks or sloths took the food.

Russets and ochres and siennas outlined charging boars and fleeing gazelles, woolly mastodons and giant sloths: he imagined that the paintings had to be thousands of years old, but then they turned a corner, and he noticed that, in the same style, there were lorries, house cats, cars, andmarkedly inferior to the other images, as if only glimpsed infrequently, and from a long way awayairplanes.