Sloth

How to spell sloth

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce sloth

What does sloth mean?

1. nounReluctance to work or make an effort; habitual laziness or idleness.
2. nounA slow-moving tree-dwelling mammal of Central and South America.

Sloth in a sentence

• His sloth cost him the promotion he had been promised.

• The sloth hung from the branch and barely moved all afternoon.

• The report blamed years of bureaucratic sloth for the delays.

• At the zoo the children watched a sloth inch along a rope.

Where does sloth come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Sloth grew directly out of the native English adjective 'slow', which in Old English was slāw and meant dull, sluggish, or lacking in speed. To it was added the old noun-forming ending -th, the same suffix that turns 'wide' into 'width' and 'strong' into 'strength', producing a word that literally meant 'the state of being slow'. The form appeared in Middle English around the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, originally spelled in ways like 'slewthe' before settling on the modern shape. Medieval moral writers seized on it to translate the Latin sin of acedia, listing sloth among the seven deadly sins as spiritual laziness or neglect of duty. Much later, in the eighteenth century, naturalists gave the name to the famously slow-moving tree-dwelling mammal of Central and South America, an apt borrowing for a creature that seems to do everything in slow motion. The single 'o' and the soft 'th' ending trip people up, since the spelling preserves the old 'slow' root rather than any modern sound cue.

How the word is built

• slow (Old English slāw: slow, sluggish)
• -th (noun-forming suffix denoting a state or quality)