slim

Meanings

1. 1
   adj

   Attractively thin; slender.

   She stayed slim by exercising every day.

2. 2
   adj

   Very small in amount; barely enough.

   I'm afraid your chances of winning are quite slim.

Common collocations

• slim chance Adjective + noun

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…

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