Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • In mining, polished and striated surfaces of the rock, often seen on the walls of fissure-veins, and the result of motion. under immense pressure, of parts of the country-rock, or of the mass of the vein itself.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun The smooth, striated, or partially polished surfaces of a fissure or seam, supposed to have been produced by the sliding of one surface on another.
  • noun A variety of galena found in Derbyshire, England.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun Plural form of slickenside.

Etymologies

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Examples

  • The fawn-grey colour, here shining as if polished by "slickensides," there dull and roughened by the rude touch of Time, is a neutral ground that takes all the tints with which sun and moon, mist and cloud, paint and glaze the world: changeable as the chameleon's, the coating is never the same for two brief hours.

    The Land of Midian — Volume 2 Richard Francis Burton 1855

  • The second fault, below, shows oblique-slip slickensides, and beneath the slickensides, in the footwall, are some calcite masses and a footwall breccia.

    Friday Fault Photos Silver Fox 2008

  • Bedded veins may be distinguished from fissure veins by the absence of all traces of a fissure, the want of a banded structure, slickensides, selvages, etc.; from gash veins and the floors of ore which often accompany them, as well as from segregated veins, they are distinguished by the nature of the inclosing rock and the foreign origin of the ore.

    Scientific American Supplement, No. 446, July 19, 1884 Various

  • Drill hole three cut a 86 metre wide, strongly fractured and altered graphitic-pyritic pelite unit containing fracturing, grey clay and slickensides.

    The Earth Times Online Newspaper 2010

  • The fawn-grey colour, here shining as if polished by “slickensides,” there dull and roughened by the rude touch of Time, is a neutral ground that takes all the tints with which sun and moon, mist and cloud, paint and glaze the world: changeable as the chameleon’s, the coating is never the same for two brief hours.

    The Land of Midian 2003

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