Slime

How to spell slime

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce slime

What does slime mean?

1. nounA soft, wet, sticky substance that is unpleasant to touch.
2. verbTo cover or smear something with a soft, sticky substance.

Slime in a sentence

• noun

  Green slime had built up along the inside of the water tank.

• verb

  The leaking pipe began to slime the cellar floor with grey muck.

• noun

  The children mixed glue and borax to make stretchy slime.

• verb

  Rotting leaves can slime the path and make it dangerously slippery.

Where does slime come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Slime descends from the Old English word slim, meaning a soft, slippery substance such as mud or mucus, and it has kept that core meaning for well over a thousand years. The root belongs to a broad Germanic family, with close cousins in Dutch slijm and German Schleim, both still meaning mucus or phlegm. Beyond the Germanic languages it reaches back to an ancient root that also gave Latin limus, meaning mud or slime, and Greek limne, a marsh or pool, so the idea of wet, sticky earth runs through all of them. Because the word is so old and native, its spelling is wonderfully plain: it is simply the sound it makes, with a silent final e marking the long vowel. That silent e is the only real spelling point, turning the short slim into the long-voweled slime.

How the word is built

• slime (single Old English root meaning soft, sticky mud or mucus; no prefix or suffix)