sloth
Pluralsloths
Pluralsloths
Formssloths, slothing, slothed
- 1Any plant-eating, tree-dwelling mammal of Central and South America belonging to the families Choloepodidae and Bradypodidae, known for its slowness and inactivity.
From the riverboat we spotted a sloth hanging motionless in the canopy above the water.
Biologists fitted several sloths with radio collars to learn how far they travel through the rainforest in a week.
Note
The animal borrowed its name from the vice: a mammal remarked on for its slowness and inactivity was called by the word for laziness. In its widest use the name covers the whole suborder Folivora. In ordinary use it means the tree-dwelling sloths of South America, and their extinct relatives are set apart as ground sloths.
- 2Laziness: a sluggish state of mind and a reluctance to take action or to work.
The audit blamed the missed deadlines on sloth and poor planning, not on a shortage of staff.
She fought her own sloth every morning, getting out of bed only when the alarm rang a third time.
Similarlaziness, idleness, indolence, lethargy, inertia
Oppositediligence, industry, energy
Note
Slowness turned into a failing: the word is slow plus the abstract noun ending -th, and its Germanic ancestor meant "slowness, lateness" before Old English slǣwþ came to mean indolence and torpor. It keeps moral company. Milton pairs it with pleasure and ease, and Benjamin Franklin likens it to rust. It takes no article: people give in to sloth, while a sloth is the animal.
- 3Any member of the extinct group called ground sloths, within the suborder Folivora.
The skeleton in the main hall belongs to a sloth that lived on the ground and grew as large as an elephant.
Bones of several extinct sloths were recovered from the tar pits alongside mammoth teeth.
Note
Paleontologists use the word for extinct relatives of the living animals. Ground sloth names a group by way of life rather than one of the formal families: members of the suborder Folivora that lived on the ground, unlike today's tree-dwelling sloths. Where extinction is not already plain from context, write ground sloth in full, because sloth alone will be read as the tree-dweller.
Less common meanings
- 4A number of bears together, considered as a single group.
The bears' counterpart to a pride of lions or a gaggle of geese.
At dawn the photographers caught a sloth of bears fishing below the falls.
The hikers backed away slowly when a sloth of bears crossed the trail ahead of them.
- 5To be idle, or to let time pass in idleness, often followed by away.
Rather than study, he would sloth away his evenings in front of the fire.
That you endeavour carefully to please your Lady, Master or Mistress, be faithful, diligent and submissive to them, encline not to sloth or laze in bed, but rise early in a morning.
1677, Hannah Woolley, The Compleat Servant-MaidNote
Seventeenth-century English had a verb as well as a noun, used with away and an object or on its own. John Bunyan, in The Strait Gate (1676), writes of slothing away time, talents and opportunities. Hannah Woolley, in The Compleat Servant-Maid (1677), tells servants not to sloth or laze in bed. The verb has since dropped out, and idle or laze now covers both patterns.
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Origin
From Middle English slouthe or slewthe ("laziness"), from Old English slǣwþ ("sloth, indolence, laziness, inertness, torpor"). This goes back through Proto-West Germanic *slaiwiþu to Proto-Germanic *slaiwiþō ("slowness, lateness"), and is equivalent to slow + -th, a suffix that forms abstract nouns. It is related to Scots sleuth ("sloth, slowness").