# sloth

Pronunciation: US say "SLAWTH" /slɔθ/; UK say "SLOHTH" /sləʊθ/

## Noun

1. Any plant-eating, tree-dwelling mammal of Central and South America belonging to the families Choloepodidae and Bradypodidae, known for its slowness and inactivity.
   - Simple: An animal of Central and South America that lives in trees, eats plants, and is known for moving slowly.
   - _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._
2. Laziness: a sluggish state of mind and a reluctance to take action or to work.
   - Simple: Being lazy, with a slow attitude and little wish to act or do 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._
3. Any member of the extinct group called ground sloths, within the suborder Folivora.
   - Simple: Any of the ground sloths, a group of sloths that no longer exist.
   - _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._

## Noun

4. A number of bears together, considered as a single group. *(rare)*
   - Simple: A number of bears that are together as a group.
   - _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._

## Verb

5. To be idle, or to let time pass in idleness, often followed by away. *(obsolete)*
   - Simple: To do nothing and not work, or to let time go by doing nothing.
   - _Rather than study, he would sloth away his evenings in front of the fire._
   - _While the others worked the fields, he slothed in the shade of the barn._

## 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").

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/sloth (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).