Slur

How to spell slur

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce slur

What does slur mean?

1. nounAn insulting or disparaging remark, especially one that damages someone's reputation or attacks a group.
2. verbTo speak words indistinctly so that the sounds run together.
3. nounA curved line over notes in written music indicating they should be played smoothly and connected.

Slur in a sentence

• noun

  The comment was widely condemned as a racial slur.

• verb

  Exhaustion can make a person slur their words by late evening.

• noun

  The violin teacher told her to follow the slur and bow the phrase in one stroke.

• noun

  He sued the newspaper for printing a damaging slur against his character.

• verb

  The medication made him slur slightly when he spoke.

• noun

  A slur over the final three notes signals a gentle, connected finish.

Where does slur come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The origins of slur are genuinely murky, which is why dictionaries tend to hedge. The most credible thread leads back to a Middle English noun, sloor or slore, meaning thin mud or slime, which is itself connected to Low German and Dutch words such as sluren, meaning to drag, trail, or do something carelessly. From the idea of trailing through mud came two figurative leaps: first the sense of smearing or staining someone's reputation, recorded in the 1600s, and then the sense of slurring sounds together by letting them drag carelessly into one another. The musical meaning, a curved line telling a player to glide smoothly from note to note, grew out of that same notion of running things together. The word entered written English around the early seventeenth century, and its slippery, sliding meanings all echo that first muddy image. Because slur is so short and phonetically plain, the only spelling trap is remembering it ends in a simple -ur rather than -er or -ir.

How the word is built

• slur (single Germanic root meaning to drag or trail, with no prefix or suffix)