slim

Meanings

1. 1
   adj

   Slender; thin.

   Movie stars are usually slim, attractive, and young.

2. 2
   adj

   Very small, tiny.

   I'm afraid your chances are quite slim.

3. 3
   adj

   Bad, of questionable quality; not strongly built, flimsy.

   A slimly-shod lad;

4. 4
   noun

   A type of cigarette substantially longer and thinner than normal cigarettes.

   I only smoke slims.

5. 5
   noun

   AIDS, or the chronic wasting associated with its later stages.

   As in the West, only about 50 per cent of patients with slim fully investigated will have a putative pathogen identified.

6. 6
   noun

   Alternative form of sling (“type of alcoholic mixed drink”)

   Crump, having fortified himself with a bobstick of rum slim, moved cautiously among the crowds who bustled along Fleet Street.

7. 7
   adj

   being of delicate or slender build

8. 8
   adj

   small in quantity

Etymology

Borrowing from Low German or Dutch slim (“bad, sly, clever”), from Middle Dutch slim (“bad, crooked”), from Old Dutch *slimb, from Proto-West Germanic *slimb, from Proto-Germanic *slimbaz (“oblique, crooked”). The sense development would have been "slanting, cunning" (Dutch) > "insignificant, slight" and then "thin, graceful" in English, a shift that Liberman calls an "incredible amelioration" of word meaning. The pejorative sense found in Low German and Dutch is also found preserved in the archaic English noun slim (“worthless or lazy person”), also comparable to the South African use of the…