Word of the Day

: February 25, 2021

slipshod

adjective SLIP-SHAHD

What It Means

1 a : wearing loose shoes or slippers

b : down at the heel : shabby

2 : careless, slovenly

slipshod in Context

"'What's worse is the rules about misinformation on social media are confusing and inconsistent, and enforcement of those policies is slipshod at best,' says Bill Fitzgerald, a privacy and technology researcher in CR's Digital Lab." — Consumer Reports, 13 Aug. 2020

"But Ryan Day couldn't help but harp on a slipshod second half in which the Buckeyes were outscored by 10 points and outgained by 126 yards." — Kyle Rowland, The Toledo (Ohio) Blade, 9 Nov. 2020

Did You Know?

The word shod is the past tense form of the verb shoe, meaning "to furnish with a shoe"; hence, we can speak of shoeing horses and horses that have been shod or shodden. When the word slipshod was first used in the late 1500s, it meant "wearing loose shoes or slippers"—such slippers were once called slip-shoes—and later it was used to describe shoes that were falling apart. By the early 1800s, slipshod was used more generally as a synonym for shabby—in 1818, Sir Walter Scott wrote about "the half-bound and slip-shod volumes of the circulating library." The association with shabbiness then shifted to an association with sloppiness, and the word was used to mean "careless" or "slovenly."