Crossword clues for slough
slough
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Slough \Slough\, obs.
imp. of Slee, to slay. Slew.
--Chaucer.
Slough \Slough\, n. [OE. slugh, slouh; cf. MHG. sl?ch the skin of a serpent, G. schlauch a skin, a leather bag or bottle.]
The skin, commonly the cast-off skin, of a serpent or of some similar animal.
(Med.) The dead mass separating from a foul sore; the dead part which separates from the living tissue in mortification.
Slough \Slough\, v. i. [imp. & p. p. Sloughed; p. pr. & vb. n. Sloughing.] (Med.) To form a slough; to separate in the form of dead matter from the living tissues; -- often used with off, or away; as, a sloughing ulcer; the dead tissues slough off slowly.
Slough \Slough\, v. t. To cast off; to discard as refuse.
New tint the plumage of the birds,
And slough decay from grazing herds.
--Emerson.
Slough \Slough\, a.
Slow. [Obs.]
--Chaucer.
Slough \Slough\, n. [OE. slogh, slough, AS. sl[=o]h a hollow place; cf. MHG. sl[=u]ch an abyss, gullet, G. schlucken to swallow; also Gael. & Ir. sloc a pit, pool. ditch, Ir. slug to swallow. Gr. ????? to hiccough, to sob.]
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A place of deep mud or mire; a hole full of mire.
--Chaucer.He's here stuck in a slough.
--Milton. -
[Pronounced sl[=oo].] A wet place; a swale; a side channel or inlet from a river.
Note: [In this sense local or provincial; also spelt sloo, and slue.]
Slough grass (Bot.), a name in the Mississippi valley for grasses of the genus Muhlenbergia; -- called also drop seed, and nimble Will.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
"muddy place," Old English sloh "soft, muddy ground," of uncertain origin. Compare Middle Low German sloch "muddy place," Middle High German sluoche "ditch." Figurative use (of moral sunkenness or Bunyan's "Slough of Despond," 1678) attested from mid-13c.
"to cast off" (as the skin of a snake or other animal), 1720, originally of diseased tissue, from Middle English noun slough "shed skin of a snake" (see slough (n.)). Related: Sloughed; sloughing.
"cast-off skin" (of a snake or other animal), early 14c., slughe, slouh, probably related to Old Saxon sluk "skin of a snake," Middle High German sluch "snakeskin, wineskin," Middle Low German slu "husk, peel, skin," German Schlauch "wineskin;" from Proto-Germanic *sluk-, of uncertain origin, perhaps from PIE root *sleug- "to glide."
Wiktionary
Etymology 1 alt. 1 The skin shed by a snake or other reptile. 2 Dead skin on a sore or ulcer. n. 1 The skin shed by a snake or other reptile. 2 Dead skin on a sore or ulcer. vb. 1 (context transitive English) To shed (skin). 2 (context intransitive English) To slide off (like a layer of skin). 3 (context transitive card games English) To discard. Etymology 2
n. 1 (context British English) A muddy or marshy are
2 (qualifier: Eastern United States) A type of swamp or shallow lake system, typically formed as or by the backwater of a larger waterway, similar to a bayou with trees. 3 (qualifier: Western United States) A secondary channel of a river delta, usually flushed by the tide. 4 A state of depression. 5 (context Canadian Prairies English) A small pond, often alkaline, many but not all are formed by glacial potholes.
WordNet
Wikipedia
Slough is a constituency represented in the House of Commons of the UK Parliament since 1997 by Fiona Mactaggart, a member of the Labour Party.
Slough is a town in Berkshire, England.
Slough may also refer to:
Slough is a large town and unitary authority area in Berkshire, England, west of London, north of Windsor, east of Maidenhead, south-east of High Wycombe and north-east of Reading. The town was historically part of Buckinghamshire. The A4 and the Great Western Main Line pass through it. In 2011, Slough's population of 140,200 was the most ethnically diverse in the United Kingdom outside London, with the highest proportion of religious adherents in England. Slough is home to the Slough Trading Estate, the largest industrial estate in single private ownership in Europe.
"Slough" is a ten-stanza poem by Sir John Betjeman, first published in his 1937 collection Continual Dew.
The British town of Slough was used as a dump for war surplus materials in the interwar years, and then abruptly became the home of 850 new factories just before World War II. The sudden appearance of this "Trading Estate", which was quickly widely reproduced throughout Britain, prompted the poem. Seeing the new appearance of the town, Betjeman was struck by the "menace of things to come". He later regretted the poem's harshness. The poem is not about Slough specifically, but about the desecration caused by industrialization and modernity in general, with the transformation of Slough being the epitome of these evils. Nevertheless, successive mayors of Slough have understandably objected to the poem.
The poem was written two years before the outbreak of World War II, during which time Britain (including Slough itself) experienced actual air raids. Much later, in a guide to English churches, Betjeman referred to some churches as "beyond the tentacles of Slough" and "dangerously near Slough". However, on the centenary of Betjeman's birth in 2006, his daughter apologised for the poem. Candida Lycett-Green said her father "regretted having ever written it". During her visit, Mrs Lycett-Green presented Mayor of Slough David MacIsaac with a book of her father's poems. In it was written: "We love Slough".
A slough is a wetland, usually a swamp or shallow lake, often a backwater to a larger body of water. Water tends to be stagnant or may flow slowly on a seasonal basis.
In North America, a slough can be a side-channel from or feeding a river, or an inlet or natural channel only sporadically filled with water. An example of this is Finn Slough on the Fraser River, whose lower reaches have dozens of notable sloughs.
In the Sacramento River, Steamboat Slough was an alternate branch of the river, a preferred shortcut route for steamboats passing between Sacramento and San Francisco. Georgiana Slough was a steamboat route through the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta, from the Sacramento River to the San Joaquin River and Stockton.
Usage examples of "slough".
It was little he could see of the road, and ere long he had tried many moss pools and sloughs, as his braw new coat bare witness.
How much of the disease, how much of the corruption, how much of the unkindness, how much of the cruelty, how much of all that still remains in us of the animal, might have been outgrown, sloughed off, put underneath our feet!
Where the periosteum had sloughed the bone was granulating, and at the time of the report skin-grafting was shortly to be tried.
Even from this distance and with so little light he could see that the enemy had sloughed off its ragged coat and moved in the air like a serpentine engine, its immense form in constant, peristaltic motion.
The Googles ate of the babu root, perhaps ceremonially, and they forgot, and in the forgetting they sloughed their culture from them, retrogressing four entire culture pouits.
It was a good two hours of methodical sloughing ahead before he came in sight of the sentinel pine Art had told him about.
The blackened flesh was sloughing away from bones that looked less human than the People had seemed in life.
There was another subterraneous tug, a juddering as if the earth wanted to slough off the rubbish heaped onto it.
Well, I got in amongst the trashy bushes, sloughed and plowed my head around, and finally unhooked the epidermis from my upper and lower jaws.
In the slough of uncleanliness wallows The he-goat, and revels the hog.
Credulous hears the fidelity swear, Which has roving eyes over yielded lips: To-morrow will fancy himself the seduced, The stuck in a treacherous slough, Because of his faith in a purchased pair, False to a vinous vow.
Grace of Ebury performed his most brilliant feat of statesmanship, and redeemed that local off-shoot of the Church of Christ over which he ruled from the political slough whereinto it had fallen.
We were coming in a bobsled, but we got stuck in the snow in a slough.
Silhouetted against the late afternoon light, a small, corpulent man entered La Bretonne, darkness sloughing off him like dust.
In Slough, Dagenham, Barnet, Letchworth, Hayes -- everywhere, indeed, on the outskirts of great towns -- the old pattern is gradually changing into something new.