Slider

How to spell slider

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce slider

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does slider mean?

1. nounA control consisting of a knob or handle that moves along a track to adjust a setting.
2. nounA small hamburger or filled bun, usually served in groups as a snack or starter.
3. nounIn baseball, a fast pitch that breaks sideways as it nears the batter.

Slider in a sentence

• Drag the volume slider to the right to make the audio louder.

• The pub menu featured a plate of three mini beef slider for sharing.

• The pitcher fooled the batter with a sharp slider low and away.

• The brightness slider lets you dim the display for evening reading.

• He ordered a chicken slider with fries at the bar.

• His slider broke late, catching the corner of the strike zone.

Where does slider come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Slider is built straightforwardly on the verb 'slide', which descends from the Old English slidan, meaning 'to glide, slip, or move smoothly over a surface'. That verb belongs to a wider family of Germanic words for sliding and slipping, and it carried the sense of a controlled, low-friction movement long before machines made use of it. The agent suffix '-er', also native to English, turns the verb into a noun for the thing that performs the action, so a slider is literally 'a thing that slides'. The mechanical and on-screen meanings (a knob or handle that moves along a fixed track) grew naturally from this in the modern era, while the American baseball sense describes a ball that appears to slide sideways as it crosses the plate. The small burger sense, popularised in the United States in the twentieth century, is sometimes said to come from the way the greasy little sandwiches seem to slide down easily. Because every part of the word is plainly visible (slide plus -er), the spelling holds few traps.

How the word is built

• slide (from Old English slidan: to glide or slip)
• -er (agent/instrument suffix: thing that slides)