Word.ws English Dictionary

slithering

slithering is the present participle and gerund of slither.

Meaning of slither

Verb

slither (third-person singular simple present slithers, present participle slithering, simple past and past participle slithered)

  1. (intransitive) To move about smoothly and from side to side.
    • [Indiana:] Wave it at anything that slithers.
      [Marion:] The whole place is slithering!1981, Lawrence Kasdan, Raiders of the Lost Ark
  2. (intransitive) To slide.
    • Some snow slides recorded have exceeded a million tons and slithered down the mountain-side at a speed of 60 miles an hour.1954 February, Trevor Holloway, “Canada's Transcontinental Routes”, in Railway Magazine, page 128

See all 6 meanings of slither

Noun

slithering (plural slitherings)

  1. The act or action of one who slithers.
    • As I lay waiting I could hear a sort of murmurousness beyond the door. It seemed composed of whimperings, slitherings, and shufflings, punctuated occasionally by a raised voice in the distance.1951, John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, published 1954, page 14
    • Here, Valéry is of the devil's party, and boasts of it throughout a long catalogue of serpentine slitherings and insinuations. To be a snake, the protagonist announces, is to be a thinker, to live by one's wits[…]2003, Sarah Kay, Terence Cave, Malcolm Bowie, A Short History of French Literature, page 263

Forms of slithering

pluralslitherings

Questions about slithering

What does slithering mean?
Slithering means the act or action of one who slithers.
What is slithering the present participle and gerund of?
Slithering is the present participle and gerund of slither.
What part of speech is slithering?
Slithering is a noun.
What is the plural of slithering?
The plural of slithering is slitherings.

Words near slithering in the dictionary

  1. slithered
  2. slitherer
  3. slitherers
  4. slitherier
  5. slitheriest
  6. slithering
  7. slitherings
  8. slitherlink
  9. slithers
  10. slithersome
  11. slithery

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: slithering (page history and authors); slither (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “slithering.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/slithering. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.