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slim

Pronunciation: /ˈslɪm/

The English word “slim” has 13 meanings listed here.

adjective

  1. Slender in an attractive way.
  2. Designed to make the wearer appear slim.
  3. Long and narrow.
  4. Of a reduced size, with the intent of being more efficient.
  5. Very small, tiny.
  6. Bad, of questionable quality; not strongly built, flimsy.
  7. Sly, crafty.

noun

  1. A type of cigarette substantially longer and thinner than normal cigarettes.
  2. A potato farl.
  3. AIDS, or the chronic wasting associated with its later stages.
  4. Cocaine.

verb

  1. To lose weight in order to achieve slimness.
  2. To make slimmer; to reduce in size.

Etymology

Borrowing from Low German or Dutch slim (“bad, sly, clever”), from Middle Dutch slim (“bad, crooked”), from Old Dutch *slimb, from Proto-West Germanic *slimb, from Proto-Germanic *slimbaz (“oblique, crooked”). The sense development would have been "slanting, cunning" (Dutch) > "insignificant, slight" and then "thin, graceful" in English, a shift that Liberman calls an "incredible amelioration" of…

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Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.