Slack

How to spell slack

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce slack

What does slack mean?

1. adjectiveLoose and not pulled tight, or showing little activity or effort.
2. nounThe loose, unused part of a rope or line, or spare capacity in a system.
3. verbTo reduce one's effort or to loosen something.

Slack in a sentence

• adjective

  The tow rope went slack as the car rolled backwards.

• noun

  She pulled in the slack until the line was tight.

• verb

  The crew refused to slack during the final hour of the shift.

• adjective

  Sales are always slack in the weeks after the holidays.

• noun

  The new server gives us plenty of slack for busy periods.

• verb

  Workers tend to slack when no manager is watching the floor.

Where does slack come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Slack descends from the Old English adjective slæc, which meant 'loose, careless, or sluggish', and it traces further back to a Germanic root shared with Dutch and German words for a relaxed or feeble state. The same ancient root also gave Latin its word laxus, the source of the English 'lax', so 'slack' and 'lax' are distant cousins that both describe something not held tight. From its earliest use the word covered both physical looseness, as in a rope that is not pulled taut, and a moral or energetic slackness, as in a person who does too little. Over the centuries it spread into nouns and verbs: the 'slack' of a rope is the loose part, to 'slack off' is to ease one's effort, and the plural 'slacks' came to mean loosely cut trousers. Because the word has stayed so short and phonetically regular, its spelling has never drifted far from the Old English form.

How the word is built

• slack (from Old English slæc: loose, sluggish); a single root word with no prefix or suffix