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.

Appears in

Simplified etymology

Slim comes from a Low German or Dutch base meaning “slanting, cross, bad.” A related unfavorable sense appeared in the mid-16th-century English noun slim, meaning a lazy or worthless person, while the adjective entered English with the sense “gracefully thin” and later also developed the meaning “poor” or “slight,” as in slim chance.

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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