slide
Noun pluralslides
Pluralslides
- 1To move smoothly over a low-friction surface such as ice, snow, or a polished floor.
The puck slid across the rink and into the goal.
Raindrops slide down the smooth glass of the windshield.
Similarglide, skid, skate, slip, slither
Note
Here the surface does the work: ice, snow or a polished floor lets a thing keep going once it starts. Edmund Waller, around 1685, could write of people who "in winter slide" without saying on what. Sliding on ice was a season's pastime in its own right, much like the regional word for sledding.
- 2To move, or cause to move, smoothly along while remaining in continuous contact with a surface.
He slid the contract across the desk for her signature.
The patio doors slide along a metal track.
Note
The oldest motion in the family comes from Old English slīdan and, further back, a root meaning "slippery". The verb works in both directions without changing shape: he slid the boat across the grass, and the safe slid slowly on its own. Past tense and past participle are normally slid, though slidden also exists as a past participle.
- 3A piece of play equipment that children climb up and then slide down, typically a smooth inclined chute with a ladder.
The new park features a curving slide twice the height of the old one.
The school replaced its old metal slides with plastic ones.
- 4A single page of a computer presentation created in software such as PowerPoint.
The quarterly report ran to forty slides, most of them charts.
Keep each slide to one idea, the speaking coach advised.
- 5A backless, open-toed sandal that the foot slips into easily.
Designer slides have become acceptable office wear in some industries.
One slide floated away when the wave caught her by surprise.
Note
In footwear, a slide is the sandal at its simplest: a sole with a single band across the front of the foot, with no back and no toe post. The name comes from how easily the foot slides in and out. The missing toe post is what separates it from a flip-flop, which stays on by a thong between the toes.
- 6A transparent plate or piece of film bearing an image, mounted for projection onto a screen.
She held the slide up to the window to check the exposure.
Decades of vacation slides filled three carousels in the attic.
Similartransparency
Note
The photographer's slide is a picture meant to be seen with light shining through it rather than printed on paper. It is a small mounted transparency, shown by projector or held up to a window. Old collections now sit in boxes waiting to be scanned into digital images, and the word itself passed by extension to the page of a computer presentation.
- 7A flat, usually rectangular piece of glass or similar material on which a prepared sample is placed for examination under a microscope.
The lab technician labeled each slide before placing it under the lens.
Stained slides revealed the bacteria in vivid purple.
Note
The laboratory slide is a plain glass rectangle that holds a specimen in the microscope's light path, often stained and covered with a thinner glass. In a lab the bare word is enough. Elsewhere, the full name microscope slide keeps it apart from the projected photograph.
- 8An act of moving smoothly along a surface; smooth, even passage or progress.
The dancer ended the routine with a long slide across the stage.
The negotiations made a quiet slide toward agreement over the following weeks.
Note
As a noun for movement as a process, the word can lean either way. Francis Bacon's Essayes of 1625 praise "a better Slide into their Business," meaning smooth, easy progress. Modern use more often means drift or decline: Matt Wray's Not Quite White (2006) describes a "cognitive slide from social to biological." To arrest a slide is the set phrase for stopping a downward one.
- 9To fall or decline in amount or value, as prices and sales often do.
The company's stock slid three percent after the earnings call.
Home values continued to slide through the winter.
Similarslip
Oppositerise, climb, rally, rebound
Note
Market reporting uses this word for a fall that is steady rather than sudden: stocks slide, home values slide, the market slid after weak results. It is milder than crash or plunge, and slip is its near-synonym. The amount follows directly, with no preposition (slid three percent), and the cause usually follows after.
- 10To slip on a slick surface so that one's footing gives way.
She slid on the icy steps and caught herself on the railing.
Hikers often slide on the wet rocks near the falls.
Similarslip
- 11To pass or place something imperceptibly; to slip it somewhere unnoticed.
He slid a folded twenty into the valet's hand.
Lobbyists managed to slide the provision into the final bill.
Similarslip, sneak, smuggle, tuck
Note
The quiet hand-off passes something so that no one notices: a note under a desk, or a word into a question. Like give, the verb readily takes two objects. Schoolchildren slide each other notes, and Steve Buckley wrote in 1992 of football players who slide each other free tickets. Slip is its close twin and can stand in for it almost everywhere.
- 12
- 13In baseball, the act of dropping down and skidding along the ground into a base.
His headfirst slide into home plate beat the catcher's tag.
Feet-first slides put less strain on the hands and wrists.
Note
The noun turns the verb's manner into adjectives: a headfirst slide, a feet-first slide, a hard slide into second. Runners slide to beat a tag, to stay on the bag, or to break up a double play. The rules limit how much contact a slide may make with a fielder. The action itself is described by the verb for reaching a base.
- 14In baseball, to drop down and skid into a base.
He slid headfirst into third and called for time.
Runners often slide to avoid the tag at second base.
Note
Baseball's verb nearly always takes into and a base: Jones slid into second, the runner slid into home. The runner moves himself, never the ball, dropping to the ground for the last few feet. The preposition carries the difference: you run to first, but you slide into it.
- 15A surface of ice, snow, butter, or the like on which a person can slide, whether for amusement or as a practical joke.
By January the schoolboys had polished a long slide down the middle of the lane.
He stepped onto the buttered slide his roommates had prepared and went down hard.
Note
Unlike a natural patch of ice, this slide is made on purpose: schoolboys polish a strip of ice, pranksters butter a floor. Charles Dickens, writing in 1836–37, gives the classic winter scene. In it, "a good long slide" on the ice is something Mr. Pickwick, cold from standing still, cannot help envying.
- 16In music, to move between two notes without a break, bending the pitch up or down along the way.
The violinist slid gracefully from the opening note into the melody's highest pitch.
Many blues singers slide up to a note rather than hitting it directly.
Note
Musicians also call this continuous change of pitch a portamento or glissando. Violinists do it by shifting a finger along the string and singers by gradually adjusting the voice. Guitarists use a finger or the glass or metal tube named after the technique. The verb usually takes up to or down to: blues singers slide up to a note.
- 17A hand-held cylinder of smooth, hard material, such as glass or metal, drawn along guitar strings to produce gliding pitches.
She slipped a brass slide onto her pinky and began the blues number.
The Delta blues sound depends on a slide gliding over open-tuned strings.
Similarbottleneck
Note
The tool and the style share a name: slide guitar is played with a slide, a smooth cylinder of glass, metal or ceramic worn on a finger and pressed lightly against the strings. Because it never pushes the string down to a fret, the pitch can glide freely between notes, the effect described under the pitch-bending verb.
- 18
- 19A machine part, or the portion of a mechanism, that moves along a fixed guide or track.
The camera mount travels on a slide so the operator can adjust framing precisely.
Grease the slide regularly to keep the press running smoothly.
Note
Engineers use the word for any part that moves along a guide, and most people meet it on a semiautomatic pistol, where the barrel sits beneath the slide. Keep it apart from the two-way lever, which is a control the hand moves; here the word names the moving member of the machine itself.
- 20A valve mechanism operated by sliding, such as the movable section of tubing on a trombone.
The trombonist extended the slide to its outermost position for the lowest note.
A slide whistle changes pitch as the slide moves through the barrel.
- 21The movable part of a zipper that opens or closes the rows of teeth; a slider.
The zipper's slide broke off, leaving the bag impossible to close.
A drop of wax on the slide will free a sticky zipper.
Similarslider
- 22To go or make one's way somewhere, as to a store or a friend's place.
We're about to slide to the store. You need anything?
He slid through the neighborhood to see who was around.
Similarroll, head, pop, go (entry)
Note
This slang use means leaving or heading somewhere and is most at home in the phrase gotta slide: "Gotta slide, this is my stop," in Paolo Hewitt's Heaven's Promise (1999). It belongs to casual talk among friends and sounds out of place in ordinary formal writing. When it means departing, it usually needs no destination at all.
- 23To kick a ball so that it travels along the ground with little or no spin.
Rather than chipping the ball, he chose to slide it through the defense.
She slid the corner kick low and hard toward the near post.
Note
Soccer uses this word for the low, unspun finish or pass. For goals it pairs with home: Phil McNulty's 2021 BBC report on Hungary 0-4 England has Raheem Sterling "slide home his 16th." For passes it pairs with through, as when a ball is threaded past defenders. The ball skims the grass instead of rising, which makes it hard to intercept.
- 24To go sledding or tobogganing down snow-covered hills for fun.
Every January the neighborhood kids slide on the golf course hills until dark.
We slid for hours on the crusty snow behind the farmhouse.
Note
In some regions people say this instead of go sledding: children go sliding, take each other sliding, love to slide. In Alice B. Emerson's Ruth Fielding at Snow Camp (1913), Tom calls out "Who'll go sliding?" over a bob-sled. In Grace Brooks Hill's The Corner House Girls Snowbound (1919), Dot sighs "I love to slide." Elsewhere, sled or toboggan is the safer choice.
- 25
- 26
- 27
- 28A grace, or ornament, consisting of two or more short notes moving by step and leading to a principal note either above or below.
Baroque keyboard players often inserted a slide to soften the approach to an accented note.
The flutist's slide into the high G gave the phrase extra elegance.
Note
This ornament is built from separate notes rather than a smear of pitch. Two or more short notes climb or fall stepwise ("by conjoint degrees") into the main note. That separates it from the pitch-bending verb, where the sound passes continuously from one note to the next. Baroque sources write it with small grace notes or a special sign.
- 29In phonetics, a sound that shades gradually into another as the vocal organs shift position, with no noticeable break.
The diphthong in 'ride' contains a slide from one vowel quality to another.
Careful listeners can hear the slide as the tongue moves between consonant and vowel.
Similarglide, transition
Note
Phoneticians use this term for the transitional sound made while the tongue and lips move from one position to the next, as in the vowel movement inside a diphthong. Modern phonetics more often calls this a glide. Glide also covers semivowels, such as the sounds at the start of yes and we.
- 30A small displacement in layers of rock where one side of a fracture has moved slightly relative to the other.
Geologists mapped a slide where the strata had shifted a few inches along the fracture.
The quarry face revealed a slide cutting cleanly through the sandstone beds.
Similarslip, dislocation
Note
Geologists use this term for a minor shift in rock beds, smaller in scale than a true fault, where strata have moved a short distance along a fissure. Keep it apart from a fall of earth downhill: here the rock is displaced in place rather than tumbling down a slope. The term belongs mainly to older geological and mining writing.
- 31To slip or err without meaning to.
Beware thou ſlide not by it, leſt thou fall before him that lieth in wait.
1611, The Holy Bible, King James Version - 32To glide onward easily with nothing in the way, or to pass by without being noticed.
- 33A fast traditional Irish dance, or a tune for it, in 12/8 time, associated with County Kerry.
- 34A detachable sleeve bearing rank badges, worn on the shoulder straps of an army uniform.
- 35A trouser pocket.
- 36A deliberate, easy stretching of a sound, used by people who stutter to gain control over their speech.
- 37A woman regarded as sexually promiscuous.
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Origin
From Middle English sliden, from Old English slīdan ("to slide"), which traces back through Proto-Germanic *slīdaną ("to slide, glide") to a Proto-Indo-European root *sleydʰ- meaning "slippery." It is related to Old High German slītan and Middle Dutch slīden.