Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun Any of various terrestrial gastropod mollusks having a slow-moving slimy elongated body with no shell or with a flat rudimentary shell on or under the skin, usually found in moist habitats.
  • noun A sea slug.
  • noun The smooth soft larva of certain insects, such as the sawfly.
  • noun A slimy mass of aggregated amoeboid cells that develops into the spore-bearing fruiting body of a cellular slime mold.
  • noun Informal A sluggard.
  • intransitive verb To wait for or obtain a ride to work by standing at a roadside hoping to be picked up by a driver who needs another passenger to use the HOV lanes of a highway.
  • noun A commuter who slugs.
  • noun A round bullet larger than buckshot.
  • noun A shot of liquor.
  • noun An amount of liquid, especially liquor, that is swallowed in one gulp; a swig.
  • noun A small metal disk for use in a vending or gambling machine, especially one used illegally.
  • noun A lump of metal or glass prepared for further processing.
  • noun A strip of type metal, less than type-high and thicker than a lead, used for spacing.
  • noun A line of cast type in a single strip of metal.
  • noun A compositor's type line of identifying marks or instructions, inserted temporarily in copy.
  • noun Physics The British unit of mass that accelerates at the rate of one foot per second per second when acted on by a force of one pound on the surface of the Earth.
  • transitive verb Printing To add slugs to.
  • transitive verb Informal To drink rapidly or in large gulps.
  • transitive verb To strike heavily, especially with the fist or a bat.
  • noun A hard heavy blow, as with the fist or a baseball bat.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • To strike heavily. Compare slugger.
  • noun A heavy or forcible blow; a hard hit.
  • noun A rather heavy piece of crude metal, frequently rounded in form.
  • noun Specifically— A bullet not regularly formed and truly spherical, such as were frequently used with smooth-bore guns or old-fashioned rifies. These were sometimes hammered, sometimes chewed into an approximately spherical form.
  • noun Hence— Any projectile of irregular shape, as one of the pieces constituting mitraille
  • noun A thick blank of typemetal made to separate lines of print and to show a line of white space; also, such a piece with a number or word, to be used temporarily as a direction or marking for any purpose, as in newspaper composing-rooms the distinctive number placed at the beginning of a compositor's “take,” to mark it as his work. Thin blanks are known as leads. All blanks thicker than one sixteenth of an inch are known as slugs, and are called by the names of their proper typebodies: as, nonpareil slugs; pica slugs
  • noun A stunted horn. Compare scur.
  • To load with a slug or slugs, as a gun.
  • In gunnery, to assume the sectional shape of the bore when fired: said of a bullet slightly larger than the bore.
  • noun In mining, a loop made in a rope for convenience in descending a shallow shaft, the miner putting his leg through the loop, by which he is supported while being lowered by the man at the windlass.
  • Slow; sluggish.
  • noun A slow, heavy, lazy fellow; a sluggard; a slow-moving animal.
  • noun Hence Any slow-moving thing.
  • noun A hindrance; an obstruction.
  • noun A lead of extra thickness used to widen the space between lines of type.
  • noun In mech., a name proposed by Worthington for the mass to which a gravitational unit of force must be applied to produce a foot-pound unit of acceleration; 32.2 (or g) times the mass of a standard pound.
  • noun A terrestrial pulmonate gastropod of one of the families Limacidæ and Arionidæ and related ones, which has only a rudimentary shell, if any.
  • noun Some or any slug-like soft-bodied insect or its larva; a grub: as, the yellow-spotted willow-slug, the larva of a saw-fly, Nematus ventralis. See pear-slug, rose-slug, slug-caterpillar, slug-worm.
  • noun The trepang or sea-cucumber; any edible holothurian; a sea-slug.
  • To be slow, dull, or inert; be lazy; lie abed: said of persons or of things.
  • To make sluggish.
  • To hinder; retard.

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

  • intransitive verb obsolete To move slowly; to lie idle.
  • transitive verb obsolete To make sluggish.
  • intransitive verb To become reduced in diameter, or changed in shape, by passing from a larger to a smaller part of the bore of the barrel; -- said of a bullet when fired from a gun, pistol, or other firearm.
  • transitive verb To load with a slug or slugs.
  • transitive verb Cant or Slang To strike heavily.

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English slugge, sluggard, probably of Scandinavian origin.]

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Perhaps from slug (from its shape).]

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Probably from slug.]

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Possibly from slug.]

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Examples

  • The crawling speed of a slug may also depend on air temperature and humidity, whether or not the slug is also grazing on the tree surface while crawling, its species and size and the slope as well as the microscopic characteristics of the surface.

    Archive 2009-06-01 AYDIN 2009

  • This slug is then followed successively by varying quantities of Diesel Fuel, Kerosene, other intermediate products, ordinary grade Gasolene, high octane, premium and Aviation Gasolenes, each succeeding product pushing the others on ahead in the line.

    Pipe Lines—Canada and Elsewhere 1952

  • In the thickest of my fight with the slugs some one said to me, Everything living has its enemy; the enemy of the slug is the toad.

    An Island Garden 1894

  • And what could happen when condensation builds up on the inside of those pipes is that the velocity of the steam picks up those little droplets of water, turns them into what they refer to as a slug and it can fire that slug at 100 miles an hour against a standing part of that pipe, like an elbow or something, and it can be like a hammer punch right to the inside of that pipe.

    CNN Transcript Jul 19, 2007 2007

  • You have a valid point, I have asked this of others in slug hunting forums.

    Bucking Slug Recoil 2009

  • For example, I rifle fired from a tree usually means the slug is going to impact the ground.

    Bucking Slug Recoil 2009

  • On 2nd thought, the idea of dbadass being teabagged by a slug is gross!

    Think Progress » Hannity: Snow Storms ‘Seem To Contradict Al Gore’s Hysterical Global Warming Theories’ 2010

  • You have a valid point, I have asked this of others in slug hunting forums.

    Bucking Slug Recoil 2009

  • I grew up in "slug only" country and killed lots of deer with 12 ga. foster types thru the years.

    Bucking Slug Recoil 2009

  • For example, I rifle fired from a tree usually means the slug is going to impact the ground.

    Bucking Slug Recoil 2009

Comments

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  • But what really brought things to a head was when she put a lot of slugs in his bed. He had a queer aversion for slugs. He lost his temper completely and said that the girl had to be sent away to school.

    --Agatha Christie, 1941, Murder in Retrospect

    November 8, 2007

  • Funny, I think an aversion to slugs is rather normal.

    (Points for your use of queer!)

    November 8, 2007

  • There's nothing wrong with slugs in the bed. Now, a lot of slugs, that's another thing entirely. I dare say I might lose my temper too.

    November 8, 2007

  • *wondering about slugabed*

    November 8, 2007

  • Not the past participle of the verb "to slog".

    November 9, 2007

  • "I've got eight slugs in me. Six of 'em's whisky and two of 'em's lead. What was it you wanted?"

    November 30, 2007

  • Bilby, who said that? What's that from?

    November 30, 2007

  • Whoever it was doesn't know how to count.

    November 30, 2007

  • *blush* I just made it up with a John Wayne kind of character in mind.

    November 30, 2007

  • Heehee. I've heard many variations on that, but never with so many whiskey slugs that the person lost count! ;-)

    November 30, 2007

  • Oh. It was in quotation marks so I thought you were quoting someone. It's cool anyway.

    November 30, 2007

  • Whisky has that effect on people. Believe.

    November 30, 2007

  • Oh, fun. It's also a "slimy mass of aggregated amoeboid cells from which the sporophore of a cellular slime mold develops" (to quote John Wayne again).

    April 15, 2014

  • 'Slug' is also used in web technology, for example in wordpress. See http://codex.wordpress.org/Glossary#Slug. Presumably based/derived from the usage in print: 'n. A title, name or header, a catchline, a short phrase or title to indicate the content of a newspaper or magazine story for editing use'

    January 2, 2015

  • I've encountered the term "slug" used to describe a code, keyword or character string that identifies an entity, property or state of being. In general, a slug is an identifier that is human-readable and descriptive, as opposed to an arbitrary identifier like a sequential integer. I have begun using the term "slug" in this manner in my own work.

    September 18, 2015