slipper
Pluralslippers
Verbslippers, slippering, slippered
Pluralslippers
Formsslippers, slippering, slippered
- 1A low, soft shoe meant to be worn indoors, such as a bedroom or house slipper.
He shuffled to the kitchen in his old leather slippers.
A sheepskin slipper keeps your foot warm on cold floors.
Note
Indoors is what this use adds: the shoe of the bedroom and the hallway, usually spoken of in pairs, as in put on your slippers. Compounds such as bedroom slipper and house slipper make the setting explicit. That helps wherever the rubber sandal also goes by the name.
- 2A low, soft shoe designed to be slipped on and off the foot with ease.
These slippers slide onto the foot with a single motion.
A good slipper requires no buckles or laces to stay on.
Similarslip-on
Note
The broadest footwear sense, named for what you do with it: Middle English slypper is simply slip plus -er, the shoe you slip into. What defines it is the absence of laces or buckles, not where it is worn. The indoor house shoe is a narrower use of the same word. The rarer pantofle covers the same ground.
- 3A flat rubber sandal held on by a strap that passes between the first two toes; a flip-flop.
Her rubber slippers slapped against her heels as she crossed the hot sand to the water.
He grabbed a slipper from the porch before heading to the sand.
Note
In Hawaii and elsewhere in US use, and across India, the Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore, slipper is the everyday name for the rubber beach sandal. A guest told to bring slippers may arrive with the wrong pair if host and guest come from opposite sides of this split. Flip-flop, sandal and thong are the alternatives that name the same shoe.
- 4A form of corporal punishment in which the buttocks are struck repeatedly with a plimsoll.
Older students still remember getting the slipper for talking in class.
The principal reserved the slipper for serious misbehavior.
Note
A punishment named for its instrument, and nearly always used with the definite article. A pupil got the slipper, and a parent could be an opponent of the slipper, as Andrew Loudon's 1981 Daily Mail report puts it. The plimsoll itself is the shoe used for it, and the act has its own verb.
- 5To spank on the buttocks with a plimsoll as a form of corporal punishment.
The headmaster threatened to slipper any boy caught smoking behind the sheds.
Masters in those days would slipper pupils for the smallest offense.
Note
School discipline in Britain, Australia and New Zealand turned the noun into a verb. It inflects regularly, as slippered and slippering, without doubling the p. It often appears in the passive, in tallies of who was slippered and how often: "slippered five times in four days." The noun for the punishment is the slipper.
- 6A piece, usually a plate, fitted to a sliding component to take up wear and permit adjustment; also called a gib.
Engineers shimmed the slipper to keep the carriage running true.
When the slipper wears down, the moving plate begins to chatter.
Similargib
Note
A machinist's wear part: the plate fitted to a slide so that it, not the slide itself, takes the friction. Its second job is adjustment. As wear opens a gap, the slipper is reset or shimmed to keep the motion true. In this sense it is interchangeable with gib, and either word may appear in the same workshop.
- 7
- 8A urinal resembling a bedpan, shaped somewhat like a slipper, for use by patients confined to bed.
The orderly emptied and rinsed the slipper after the morning round.
A ceramic slipper let the bedbound patient relieve himself without rising.
Similarbedpan
Note
A word from nursing and patient care, named for its shape rather than its use. The low-profile vessel resembles the house shoe closely enough to borrow its name. It serves recumbent or immobilized patients who cannot leave the bed. On a ward the context does the disambiguating: an orderly emptying a slipper is handling the urinal, not footwear.
- 9The plimsoll or gym shoe used as the instrument of corporal punishment by striking the buttocks.
The master took down the slipper that hung by the blackboard.
A worn rubber slipper served as the favored instrument of discipline.
Similarplimsoll
Note
Calling a gym shoe a slipper softened what it was for. James Morgan's Stretching Forward to Learn (2004) recalls that every teacher had "what was referred to as a 'slipper'". In reality it was a cut-down gym shoe kept for smacking. The word belongs to memories of school discipline, so outside that setting readers will picture house footwear instead.
- 10A person or creature that loses footing and slips.
The new colt was a real slipper on wet grass.
As a frequent slipper on slick floors, she always wore rubber soles.
Note
The plain agent noun, slip plus -er. It runs parallel to the easy-on shoe, which takes its name from being slipped on. Because the footwear meaning crowds it, writers often fence it in quotation marks, as Barry M. Levenson does in Habeas Codfish (2001) when he pairs the banana-peel "slipper" with the "slippee." In Father John Doe's Sobriety and Beyond (1955) it means someone who keeps relapsing into drink. Dagulf Loptson renders Odin's horse Sleipnir as "the slipper."
- 11
Less common meaning
- 12Slippery; smooth or wet enough to cause slipping.
The deck grew slipper with sea-spray, and the sailors trod with care.
O! trustless state of earthly things, and slipper hope / Of mortal men.
1579, Immeritô [pseudonym; Edmund Spenser], “Nouember. Ægloga Vndecima.”Note
An obsolete adjective that slippery has long since replaced. Spenser uses it figuratively in 1579: "slipper hope / Of mortal men." There it means unreliable, apt to give way, rather than literally slick underfoot. Modern writers should use slippery and keep slipper for deliberate period pastiche.
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Practice
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Origin
From Middle English slypper, formed from slip plus the suffix -er.