Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. An untidy, dirty woman.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. A woman who is negligent of her dress, or who suffers her clothes and household furniture to be in disorder; one who is not neat and nice; a slut.
- Pertaining to or characteristic of a slattern; slovenly; slatternly.
- To consume carelessly or idly; waste: with away.
Wiktionary
- n. A slut.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. A woman who is negligent of her dress or house; one who is not neat and nice.
- adj. Resembling a slattern; sluttish; slatterny.
- v. rare To consume carelessly or wastefully; to waste; -- with
away .
WordNet 3.0
- n. a dirty untidy woman
- n. a prostitute who attracts customers by walking the streets
Etymologies
- Dating from the seventeenth century; related to slattering ("slovenly"), from the dialectal verb slatter ("to slop, to spill"). (Wiktionary)
- Perhaps from dialectal slattering, slovenly, present participle of dialectal slatter, to slop. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“I fancy my predecessor must have been a "slattern," for everything was thick with dust.”
“While "slattern" and "French letter" are dated, they made me think of those cute nicknames parents give the vagina, labia, penis, and scrotum when talking to their kids.”
“When we first see her in Minneapolis, a slattern in a junk-strewn apartment, she's living on scraps of loveless sex, drinking too much and picking up snatches of kids' conversations here and there, then dropping them into her chronicles of Kendall Strickland, the teenage heroine of a series called Waverly Prep that is, in fact, headed for the dustbin of subliterary history.”
The Wall Street Journal: Nervy 'Young Adult' Dazzles by the Book
“I am clearly an unorganized slattern of the worst sort..”
“I am also curious how you brought the old slattern back.”
“Why would I be jealous just because I saw you pawing some slattern in the kitchen yard?”
“An American cackle, piercing my ear, and I shuddered away by instinct, which was sound judgment, for if I felt dreadful, she looked worse, a raddled slattern grinning her stinking breath into my face, reaching out a fat hand across my chest.”
“And aII because Mrs Huffmaster, a barefoot slattern with half a dozen snottering brats at her heels, "came a-callin"', peeping round Annie on the porch to get a look inside, and remarking slyly "what a smart lot o' shirts your men-folk has ", when we'd carelessly put all our washing out at once, and there were clothes for fifteen or twenty fluttering on the green.”
“In the perverse way of teenagers, she enjoyed the odd freedom of the scarlet S (for slut, slattern, skank) which she got to (pretend to) wear around the house for the last months she was there.”
“You are clearly becoming a slattern, and my royal court is run by a hedgerow slut, just as my mother warned me.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘slattern’.
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Interesting words
A list of words that are odd or words that I have looked up.
concupiscence, brize, scree, scoria, forestaff, spanaemia, valetudinarianism, distasture, pyrethrum, laudanum, gentian, bicameral and 11184 more...
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Words build meanings from origins( et...
These come from gamma meditation ,I think.
discursive, exogenous, machinations, purportedly, sumptuous, congruity, cantankerous, incongruous, festoon, hessian, ratiocinative, stratigraphic and 2046 more...
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scoundrels and bastards
already several of these lists, but I wanted my own
varlet, scoundrel, ne'er-do-well, cad, thug, churl, boor, hooligan, bastard, slubberdegullion, dastard, tosspot and 85 more...
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the first list
an immense, grandiloquent list that loads like a thousand years sentence in stone. new words are in the other lists.
ridiculous, brummagem, predicament, sanctimonious, vapid, eschew, admonish, auspicious, capitulation, enumerate, lachrymose, tenet and 1648 more...
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quality words
This is a mix of new words I've read studying for the GRE verbal and words I use normally. I also check back on these words if I don't use them often enough.
ineffable, septuagenarian, sesquipedalian, argyle, coalescence, profundity, vivisepulture, defenestrate, concatenate, usurp, diatribe, veracious and 461 more...
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Quaintnesses
For those who wish no words were ever forgotten
opprobrium, tedium, encomium, odium, ire, enmity, beguile, wile, brazen, popinjay, squit, hoity-toity and 1161 more...
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ashton's Words
genocide, boingy, umwelt, zeitgeist, fungible, vorpal, spawn, discordian, fnord, surreptitious, xyzzy, corruption and 122 more...
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tree's Words
aphasia, anhedonia, promontory, misandry, amanuensis, asymptote, penultimate, muslin, tundra, calico, kinaesthesia, rutabaga and 209 more...
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Words I'd Like to Use Someday
thundersnow, phantasmagoria, mercurial, chimerical, taciturn, paraclete, lapis lazuli, flay, guttersnipe, wonky, misanthrope, kestrel and 583 more...
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summer words 2009
how many words can I make mine this summer?
largess, hoyden, catholic, fornicatress, quean, slattern, bildungsroman, sybaritic, descresent, nodus, frittle, callipygian and 529 more...
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beatricks's Words
tremendous, naiad, thrush, samsara, thronging, nascent, broom, aristeia, streak, susurrant, reverberate, resistentialism and 352 more...
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madmelanie's Words
monkey, folderol, snark, snarky, flibbertigibbet, faith, asshat, pirouette, avuncular, exegesis, memento mori, verisimilitude and 379 more...
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ADW1
obdurate, obstinate, behest, injunction, enjoin, circumspect, ensconce, discursive, lugubrious, doleful, somber, ken and 2476 more...
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Ptolemy's Gate
Words and phrases from Jonathan Stroud's book, Ptolemy's Gate.
fall afoul, fleet, tamarisk, krait, inkstone, hotted up, down-market, have a truck with, brio, fatalistic, knock-kneed, conserve and 210 more...
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My Words
heuristic, malapropism, vicissitude, discursive, interstitial, velleity, phosphene, pandiculate, obdormition, vertiginous, flibbertigibbet, truculent and 128 more...
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stpeter's Words
abase, abasement, abashed, abdicate, aberrant, abeyance, abhor, abhorrent, abide, abject, ablation, abnegation and 3536 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for slattern.
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