Sloppy

How to spell sloppy

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce sloppy

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does sloppy mean?

1. adjectiveDone carelessly or lacking neatness, attention, and precision.
2. adjectiveWet, splashy, or muddy in a messy way.

Sloppy in a sentence

• The manager rejected the report because of its sloppy formatting and typos.

• The dog tracked sloppy footprints across the kitchen after the rain.

• His sloppy handwriting made the form almost impossible to read.

• The path turned sloppy and slick after a week of heavy storms.

Where does sloppy come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Sloppy grows out of the noun slop, which in Middle English meant a puddle of mud or a mess of spilled liquid, and which descends from the Old English word sloppe, a term for a slimy or muddy substance such as cow dung. The adjective was formed simply by adding the suffix -y, meaning 'full of' or 'characterised by', so sloppy first described things that were wet, splashy, or muddy. By the 1700s it had widened from literal wetness to mean watery or thin food, the same flavour preserved today in 'sloppy joes'. During the nineteenth century the meaning drifted again toward general carelessness, untidiness, and lack of precision, which is now the dominant sense. The spelling trap is the doubled p: because the root slop ends in a single consonant after a short vowel, English doubles it before the -y, just as it does in 'choppy' and 'floppy'.

How the word is built

• slop (a puddle, spilled liquid, mess)
• -p- (doubled consonant)
• -y (adjective suffix: full of)