sloughing

Pluralsloughings

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of slough.

   Dead cells are constantly sloughing off the surface of the skin.

   With no spades left, he kept sloughing his worthless diamonds.

   Note

   Off often follows when an outer layer is coming away: dead cells sloughing off the skin, a snake sloughing off its old skin. The form can take an object or stand alone, and at the card table it means throwing away a worthless card. In western US dialect, sloughing can also mean staying away from school without permission.

2. 2
   nouncountable

   The act of shedding an old skin or outer shell.

   Biologists logged each sloughing to track how often the young rattlesnakes shed.

   A crab is soft and easy prey for a while after each sloughing.

   Similarmolt, shedding

   Note

   Ecdysis is the technical name and molting the everyday one. The noun counts events, so researchers can tally sloughings per snake: a rattlesnake study in the Bulletin of the Florida Museum of Natural History put the interval at about 246 days, or 1.5 sloughings a year, though it could not be sure every shed was recorded.

3. 3
   nouncountable or uncountable

   Something that has been shed or has come away from a surface as an outer layer.

   The settling tank collects the sloughings that wash off the trickling filter.

   Under the microscope, the sloughing from the wound showed signs of infection.

   Note

   Wastewater engineers use it in the plural: sloughings are the excess solids and slime stripped from a filter's media and carried with the flow to a settling tank for removal. In medicine the singular can name tissue that has come away from a wound.

Showing meanings only. Show all 3