Noun: sludge
| Singular | sludge |
| Plural | sludges |
Sample Sentences
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Floods in northern India, mostly in the small state of Uttarakhand, have wrought disaster on an enormous scale.[…]Rock-filled torrents smashed vehicles and homes, burying victims under rubble and sludge. [2013 June 29, “High and wet”, in The Economist, volume 407, number 8842, page 28:]
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In the 2008 best seller Nudge, the legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein and the economist Richard H. Thaler marshaled behavioral-science research to show how small tweaks could help us make better choices. An updated version of the book includes a section on what they called “sludge”—tortuous administrative demands, endless wait times, and excessive procedural fuss that impede us in our lives. [[2025 June 29, Chris Colin, “That Dropped Call With Customer Service? It Was on Purpose.”, in The Atlantic, retrieved 29 Jun 2025, Ideas:]
Nouns inflected like sludge
soldier's woundwort,
Nicosian,
whopper,
greypate,
tactile sign language,
chronotrope,
Rosie Lee,
dissentient,
photoinactivator,
sulphonediimine,
coastal waterfall,
residuary devise,
bituminization,
nitrosonaphthol,
smṛiti,
geosphere,
backscreen,
mensuralist,
flocculate,
flocculant, etc. (List truncated at 20 nouns)
Etymology
From Middle English slugge, sluche (“mud, mire”), probably an alteration of Middle English sliche, slicche ("mud, slush, tar"; whence Modern English slitch), from Old English *sliċ, from Proto-West Germanic *sliki, *slīk, from Proto-Germanic *slikiz, *slīką (“mud, slush”). Cognate with Dutch slijk, German Schlick. Compare also slush. See: Middle English Nouns '
slugge', Middle English Nouns '
sliche', English Nouns '
slitch', Dutch Nouns '
slijk', German Nouns '
Schlick'.