sloughing

sloughing is the present participle and gerund of slough.

Noun

sloughing (plural sloughings)

Something sloughed off.
- As the zoogleal slime reenters the wastewater, excess solids and waste products are stripped off the media as sloughings. These sloughings are transported with the wastewater flow to a settling tank for removal.2012, Frank Spellman, Revonna Bieber, Environmental Health and Science Desk Reference, page 831
The act of casting off the skin or shell; ecdysis.
- If all sloughings were successfully recorded, which is not certain since rattle segments were not color-coded during this study, the interval between events averaged 246.1 days (1.5 sloughings per snake per year).1995, Bulletin of the Florida Museum of Natural History: Volume 38

slough (third-person singular simple present sloughs, present participle sloughing, simple past and past participle sloughed)

(transitive) To shed skin or outer layers.
- This skin is being sloughed.
(intransitive) To slide off or flake off, as an outer layer, such as skin, might do.
- A week after he was burned, a layer of skin on his arm sloughed off.
(transitive) To discard.
- East sloughed a heart.
(US, Western, intransitive, slang) To commit truancy, be absent from school without permission.

Synonyms:

ditch

plural	sloughings

What does sloughing mean?: Sloughing means something sloughed off.
What is sloughing the present participle and gerund of?: Sloughing is the present participle and gerund of slough.
What part of speech is sloughing?: Sloughing is a noun.
What is the plural of sloughing?: The plural of sloughing is sloughings.

Adapted from Wiktionary: sloughing (page history and authors); slough (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.

Last updated: 2026-09-02

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