slunk
/slʌŋk/
slunk noun: an animal, especially a calf, born prematurely or abortively. Also the simple past and past participle of slink.
Noun (1)
slunk (plural slunks)
- An animal, especially a calf, born prematurely or abortively.
- Then I met a great guy, Placenta Juan the Afterbirth Tycoon. Made his in slunks during the war. (Slunks are underage calves trailing afterbirths and bacteria, generally in an unsanitary and unfit condition.)1962 [1959], William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch, New York: Grove Press
- Calf heads were tanned from yearling calves less than a year in age. Slunk skins were tanned from unborn calfskins which, gruesome as it sounds, were often by products of the cow slaughtering process.2001, ed. Rob Cook, The Making of a Drum Company, Hal Leonard, published 2001, page 53
Noun (2)
slunk (plural slunks)
- A slough, a low, wet, miry place. (Compare slank.)
- Amang the harbour's sludge and mud; They row'd thegither in the slunk; Their heads were up, their bodies sunk; What wi' the slusch they ate and drunk, […]1827, William Tennant, Papistry Storm'd: Or, The Dingin' Down O' the Cathedral : Ane Poem, in Sax Sangs, page 88
- He made the road, and since it was made there was never anything done to it except when men were carting turf and then they would fill in a "slunk." You might say now it is no road.1907, Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons, Sessional Papers, page 202
Also used as
slunk is also the simple past and past participle of slink.
Forms of slunk
| plural | slunks |
|---|
Origin of slunk
From an allusive sense of slink (“to bring forth young prematurely”).
Compare slank (“low place, especially one which fills with water”), dialectal slonk (“depression, hollow, slough”).
Words that rhyme with slunk
Questions about slunk
- What does slunk mean?
- Slunk means an animal, especially a calf, born prematurely or abortively.
- What part of speech is slunk?
- Slunk is a noun.
- How do you pronounce slunk?
- Slunk is pronounced /slʌŋk/.
- What is the plural of slunk?
- The plural of slunk is slunks.
Words near slunk in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: slunk (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Pvanp7-slunk.wav, LL-Q1860 (eng)-Wodencafe-slunk.wav.
Cite this entry: “slunk.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/slunk. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.