slopping

Pluralsloppings

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of slop.

   He kept slopping paint onto the floor as he worked on the ceiling.

   Every morning before school she was out in the yard slopping the pigs.

   Note

   The verb has narrower lives besides spilling, and all of them share this form: slopping the pigs is feeding them, and in pool or snooker slopping a ball means pocketing it by accident. With no object it describes heavy going over wet ground, as in slopping across a muddy field.

2. 2
   nouncountable

   Liquid that has been spilled or splashed about.

   Sloppings of coffee down the side of the mug showed he had carried it upstairs in a hurry.

   Sloppings of beer had dried into sticky rings along the bar.

   Similarspill, splash

   Note

   The noun usually travels in the plural, with of and the liquid after it. Arthur Conan Doyle, examining a table, could see none of the "sloppings of water" he expected to find, and Horace Marryat stretches the word to a whole landscape, calling ancient lakes "sloppings of the great deluge".

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