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slab

Pronunciation: /slæb/

The English word “slab” has 20 meanings listed here.

noun

  1. A large, flat piece of solid material; a solid object that is large and flat.
  2. A paving stone; a flagstone.
  3. A carton containing 24 cans (chiefly of beer).
  4. An outside piece taken from a log or timber when sawing it into boards, planks, etc.
  5. The slack part of a sail.
  6. A very large wave.
  7. The amount by which a cache can grow or shrink, used in memory allocation.
  8. Part of a tectonic plate that is being, or has been, subducted.
  9. A poured-concrete foundation for a building.
  10. A region between two parallel lines in the Euclidean plane, or between two parallel planes in three-dimensional Euclidean space, or between two hyperplanes in higher dimensions.
  11. Any of the several portions or tiers in a tax rate plan.
  12. A flat, sealed plastic case that encloses a flat collector's item, such as a coin or a trading card.
  13. A large, luxury pre-1980 General Motors vehicle, particularly a Buick, Oldsmobile, or Cadillac.
  14. Mud, sludge, or other viscous matter.
  15. A car that has been modified with equipment such as loudspeakers, lights, special paint, hydraulics, and other accessories.
  16. A bird, the wryneck.
  17. A sequence of 12 adjacent bits, serving as a byte in some computers.

verb

  1. To make into a slab.
  2. To destroy (a structure) so completely as to leave only the foundation slab visible.

adjective

  1. Thick; viscous.

Etymology

From Middle English sclabbe, slabbe, of uncertain origin; possibly from *slap, related to dialectal slappel (“portion, piece”), along with slape (“slippery”), sleip (“smooth piece of timber”), borrowed through Old Norse sleipr from Proto-Germanic *slaipaz, from Proto-Indo-European *(s)leyb-. See also Norwegian sleip (“slippery”) and Icelandic sleipur.

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Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.