Copyright © Philip M. Parker, INSEAD. Terms of Use.
Definition: Sloth |
SlothNoun1. A disinclination to work or exert yourself. 2. Any of several slow-moving arboreal mammals of South and Central America; they hang from branches back downward and feed on leaves and fruits. 3. Apathy and inactivity in the practice of virtue (personified as one of the deadly sins). Source: WordNet 1.7.1 Copyright © 2001 by Princeton University. All rights reserved. |
Date "sloth" was first used: sometime in the early 12th century. (references) |
(From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia)
Sloths Scientific classification
Domain: Eukaryota Kingdom: Animalia Phylum: Chordata Class: Mammalia Order: Xenarthra Families: Megalonychidae
BradypodidaeGenera Bradypus
CholoepusSloths are medium-sized South American mammals belonging to the families Megalonychidae and Bradypodidae, part of the order Xenarthra. Sloths are herbivores, eating very little other than leaves.
Sloths have made extraordinary adaptations to an aboreal browsing lifestyle. Leaves provide very little energy or nutrition and do not digest easily: sloths have very large, specialised, slow-acting stomachs with multiple compartments in which symbiotic bacteria break down the tough leaves. As much as two-thirds of a well-fed sloth's body-weight consists of the contents of its stomach, and the digestive process can take as long as a month or more to complete. Even so, leaves provide little energy, and sloths deal with this by a range of economy measures: they have very low metabolic rates (less than half of that expected for a creature of their size), and maintain low body temperatures when active (30 to 34 degrees), and still lower temperatures when resting.
Sloths move only when necessary and then very slowly: they have about half as much muscle tissue as other animals of similar weight. Their specialised hands and feet have long, curved claws to allow them to hang upside-down from branches without effort; while they sometimes sit on top of branches, they usually eat, sleep and even give birth hanging from limbs. They come to the ground, to urinate and defecate, only about once a week.
Sloth fur too exhibits specialised functions: the outer hairs grow in the opposite direction to that of other mammals (so as to provide protection from the elements despite living legs-uppermost), and in moist conditions host two species of symbiotic blue-green algae, which provide camouflage and possibly extra nutrition, either licked directly from the fur or absorbed through the skin.
Despite sloths' apparent defencelessness, predators do not pose special problems: in the trees sloths have good camouflage and, moving only slowly, do not attract attention. Only during their infrequent visits to ground level do they become vulnerable. Despite their adaptation to living in trees, sloths make competent swimmers.
Infant sloths normally cling to their mother's fur; those that fall off die in some cases, because the mothers sometimes prove unwilling to leave the safety of the tree to retrieve them.
Until geologically recent times, large ground-dwelling sloths of the Megatherium type lived in North America, but along with many other species they became extinct immediately after the arrival of humans on the continent. Much evidence suggests that the extinction of the American megafauna, like that of Australia, far northern Asia, and New Zealand, resulted from human activity. Nevertheless, scientific debate on the matter continues.
The living sloths belong to one of two families, known as the two-toed and three-toed sloths. Both families have three toes: the "two-toed" sloths, however, have only two fingers. Both types tend to occupy the same forests: in most areas, a particular single species of three-toed sloth and a single species of the larger two-toed type will jointly pre-dominate.
Although unable to survive outside the tropical rainforests of South and Central America, within that environment sloths are outstandingly successful creaures: they can account for as much as half the total energy consumption and two-thirds of the total terrestrial mammalian biomass in some areas. Of the five species, only one, the Maned Two-toed Sloth, has a classification of "endangered" at present. The ongoing destruction of South America's forests, however, may soon require revision of other sloths' "endangered" status.
The term sloth can also transfer metaphorically to other slow-moving animals, including the Sloth Bear of India, and several primates, including species of slow loris, lemur and galago. The Koala has been called the "Australian sloth". All these animals receive their name from the noun sloth, which is simply the Middle English noun-form of the adjective slow (formed in the same way as true→truth). In modern usage, however, it means "lazy, inactive, idle, indolent, sluggish, and slow"; these qualities make Sloth one of the Seven deadly sins.
- ORDER XENARTHRA
- Family Myrmecophagidae: anteaters
- Family Megalonychidae: two toed sloths
- Brown-throated Three-toed Sloth, Bradypus variegatus
- Pale-throated Three-toed Sloth, Bradypus tridactylus
- Maned Three-toed Sloth, Bradypus torquatus
- Family Bradypodidae: three toed sloths
- Hoffman's Two-toed Sloth, Choloepus hoffmanni
- Southern Two-toed Sloth, Choloepus didactylus
- Family Dasypodidae: armadillos
Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia under a copyleft GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) from the article "Sloth."
Synonyms: SlothSynonyms: acedia (n), laziness (n), slothfulness (n), tree sloth (n). (additional references) |
| Context | Synonyms within Context (source: adapted from Roget's Thesaurus). |
Inactivity | Idleness, remissness; Adjective: sloth, indolence, indiligence; dawdling; Verb: ergophobia, otiosity. |
Physical Inertness | Mental inertness; sloth; (inactivity); inexcitability; irresolution; obstinacy; permanence. |
| Source: adapted from Roget's Thesaurus. | |
Crosswords: Sloth |
| English words defined with "sloth": Accidie, AI, Aswail ♦ Bradypus tridactylus ♦ Choloepus didactylus, Choloepus hoffmanni ♦ Do-nothingness ♦ Forslack, Forslouthe ♦ genus Melursus ♦ Jungle bear ♦ Losel ♦ Megalonyx, megatherian, megatherian mammal, megatheriid, Melursus ♦ Slack hand, Slewth, Sluggardy ♦ Tardo, three-toed sloth, two-toed sloth ♦ unau. (references) |
| Specialty definitions using "sloth": on penicillan ♦ Seven Deadly Sins. (references) |
| Etymologies containing "sloth": Slewth. (references) |
| Domain | Usage | |
Screenplays | Hey, I'm a sloth. I see a tree, eat a leaf (Ice Age; writing credit: Michael Berg) | |
Movie/TV Titles | Sloth (1917) | |
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | ||
| Domain | Title |
Books | |
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | |
| Thumbnail | Description & Credit |  | The sloth / O. Herford. Credit: Library of Congress. |
Source: pictures compiled by the editor from various references; see picture credits. | |||
| Author | Quotation |
Benjamin Franklin | Sloth, like rust, consumes faster than labor wears, while the used key is always bright. |
Horace | You must avoid sloth, that wicked siren. |
John Milton | Thus Belial, with words clothed in reason's garb, counseled ignoble ease, and peaceful sloth, not peace. |
William Ellery Channing | Natural amiableness is too often seen in company with sloth, with uselessness, with the vanity of fashionable life. |
Source: compiled by the editor from various references. | |
| Title | Author | Quote |
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man | Joyce, James | His thoughts were lice born of the sweat of sloth. |
Source: compiled by the editor from various references. | ||
| "Sloth" is generally used as a noun (singular) -- approximately 98.46% of the time. "Sloth" is used about 65 times out of a sample of 100 million words spoken or written in English. Its rank is based on over 700,000 words used in the English language. Some parts-of-speech are not covered due to the samples used by the British National Corpus. (note: percents less than one-hundredth of one percent have been omitted) |
| Parts of Speech | Percent | Usage per 100 Million Words | Rank in English |
| Noun (singular) | 98.46% | 64 | 42,009 |
| Noun (proper) | 1.54% | 1 | 339,140 |
| Total | 100.00% | 65 | N/A |
Source: compiled by the editor from several corpora; see credits.
Expressions using "sloth": Australian sloth ♦ ground sloth ♦ native sloth ♦ sloth animalcule ♦ sloth animalcules ♦ sloth bear ♦ sloth monkey ♦ tree sloth. Additional references. | |
| Hyphenated Usage | |
Beginning with "sloth": sloth-bear, sloth-brained, sloth-flattened, sloth-like. | |
| Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | |
| The following statistics estimate the number of searches per day across the major English-language search engines as identified by various trade publications. Hyperlinks lead to commercial use of the expression at Amazon.com. |
| Language | Translations for "sloth"; alternative meanings/domain in parentheses. | |
Afrikaans | ai (ai, ouch, ow, three-toed sloth). (various references) | |
Albanian | plogështi (angularity, apathy, idleness, inaction, indolence, inertia, languor, lassitude, phlegm, tardiness, torpor), përtesë (indolence, laziness), përtaci (idle, idleness, idling, indolence, inoccupation, laziness, slack). (various references) | |
Arabic | كسل (drowse, idleness, inaction, inactivity, indolence, inertia, languor, lassitude, laziness, lethargy, slothful, sluggard, sluggishness), تراخي, الكسلان حيوان. (various references) | |
Bulgarian | мързел (idleness, indolence, laziness), леност (idleness, indolence, inertia), ленивец (lazybones, lotus eater, sluggard, tardigrade). (various references) | |
Czech | lenost (laziness), lenochod. (various references) | |
Danish | art af dovendyr (Bolivian three-toed sloth). (various references) | |
Dutch | luiaard (ai), ai (ai, three-toed sloth). (various references) | |
Esperanto | bradipo, akeo (ai). (various references) | |
Farsi | کاهلی , تنبلی (Inaction, Indolence), تنبل بودن , تنبل (Idle, Inactive, Indolent, Laze, Lazy, Lazybones, Slothful, Slouch, Slow, Sluggish, Tardy), سستی (Droop, Inaction, Indolence, Insecurity, Lassitude), بیکاری (Unemployment, Vacation). (various references) | |
Finnish | laiskiainen, hitaus (inertia, slowness, sluggishness). (various references) | |
French | paresse (slothfulness). (various references) | |
German | Faulheit (idleness, laziness, slothfulness). (various references) | |
Greek | βραδύπουσ, νωθρότησ (slovenliness, sluggishness), νωθρότητα (indolence, listlessness, slackness, slovenliness, sluggishness), οκνηρία (boredom, laziness, shiftlessness). (various references) | |
Hebrew | עצלן (lazy, lazybones, slacker, sluggard), עצלות (indolence, laziness), עצל" (idleness, laziness), עצל ות (laziness, sluggishness), רפות (indolence, laziness). (various references) | |
Hungarian | lustaság (accidie, laziness, slothfulness, slowness), lajhár. (various references) | |
Italian | pigrizia (idleness, laziness, slothfulness). (various references) | |
Japanese Kanji | け者 (lazy fellow, lazy person). (various references) | |
Japanese Katakana | なまけもの (lazy fellow, lazy person), ぶしょう (commanding officer, indolence, laziness, military commander). (various references) | |
Manx | raiseyder (climber, creeper, groper), neuharrooghys (inactivity), neuharrooghid (inactivity), lhiastid (diffidence, idleness, inaction, inactivity, indisposition, indolence, languidness, languor, lassitude, laziness, reluctance, slowness, sluggishness). (various references) | |
Pig Latin | othslay.(various references) | |
Portuguese | preguiça (ai, laziness, lubberliness). (various references) | |
Romanian | trândãvie (idleness, idling, laziness, lounge), tembelism (sluggishness), nepãsare (apathy, carelessness, casualness, disregard, indifference, laxity, listlessness, negligence, nonchalance, recklessness, remissness, unconcern), lene (dullness, idleness, inaction, languor, laziness), indolenţã (carelessness, idleness, indolence), indiferenţã (apathy, carelessness, coldness, coolness, detachment, disregard, equanimity, frigidity, indifference, insensibility, listlessness, nonchalance, phlegm, recklessness, regardlessness, remissness, torpor, unconcern), comoditate (comfortableness, convenience, cosiness, ease, handiness, snugness). (various references) | |
Russian | нерадение, лень (inactivity, inertia, laziness), ленивец (chair warmer, chairwarmer, lazy-bones). (various references) | |
Scottish | siad (a stink: *seiddo-), leisg (a. better : leasg, indolence, laziness, slothfulness). (various references) | |
Serbo-Croatian | tromost (heaviness, indolence, laziness, listlessness, sluggishness, torpor), lenjost (indolence, laziness, work-shy), lenjivac (sluggard). (various references) | |
Spanish | pereza (laziness, shiftlessness, slothfulness, sluggishness). (various references) | |
Swedish | trögdjur (sluggard), slöhet (aparthy, apathy, bluntness, dullness, indolence, inertia, languor, lassitude, laziness, lethargy, spend, torpidity, torpor), lättja (idleness, laziness). (various references) | |
Thai | ความขี้เกียจ (otioseness). (various references) | |
Turkish | yakalı tembel hayvan, uyuşukluk (deadness, dormancy, drowsiness, indolence, inertia, inertness, lethargy, numbness, sluggishness, somnolence, stupefaction, stupor, torpidity, torpidness, torpor), tembellik (dalliance, dilatoriness, idleness, inaction, inactivity, indolence, inertia, laziness, slackness, sluggishness, stagnancy, stagnation, vacancy), miskinlik (laziness, slackness, stagnancy), üşengeçlik (dalliance, dilatoriness, inactivity, indolence). (various references) | |
Ukrainian | лінощі, лінивець, повільність (backwardness, heaviness, tardiness). (various references) | |
Vietnamese | sự uể oải sự chậm chạp, sự lười biếng (indolence, laziness, work-shy). (various references) | |
Welsh | syrthni (inertia, listlessness). (various references) | |
| Source: compiled by the editor from various translation references. | ||
| Language | Period | Translations |
| Latin | 500 BCE-Modern | Bradypodidae, Bradypus boliviensis, Bradypus griseus, Bradypus variegatus, Choloepus hoffmanni, Melurus ursinus, pigritia, pigritiis. (various references) |
| Avestan | 200-600 | bûshyãsta. (various references) |
| Source: compiled by the editor from various references. | ||
Derivations | |
Words beginning with "sloth": slothful, slothfully, slothfulness, slothfulnesses, sloths. (additional references) | |
| |
"Sloth" is suggested in spellcheckers for the following: Alioth, eslot, sclot, scoth, sleh, sliht, slitch, slith, slithy, Sloch, slogh, Slonta, sloot, sloothe, slorh, slota, slote, slothe, sloths, slouth, sluth, slutz, slyth, snoth, solih, soth, sowth, sroth. (additional references) | |
| Source: compiled by the editor, based on several corpora (additional references). | |
| # of Phoneme Matches | Pronunciation | Word(s) rhyming with "sloth" (pronounced slō"th) |
| 3 | -l ō" th | loath. |
Source: compiled by the editor (additional references); see credits. | ||
Scrabble® Enable2K-Verified Anagrams | |
Direct Anagrams: holts. | |
| Words within the letters "h-l-o-s-t" | |
-1 letter: hols, holt, host, hots, lost, loth, lots, shot, slot, soth, tosh. | |
-2 letters: hot, lot, ohs, sol, sot, tho. | |
-3 letters: ho, lo, oh, os, sh, so, to. | |
| Words containing the letters "h-l-o-s-t" | |
+1 letter: cloths, helots, holist, hostel, hostly, hotels, lithos, lotahs, sloths, thiols, tholes, tholos. | |
+2 letters: clothes, coltish, coolths, doltish, eoliths, ghostly, harlots, holiest, holists, holster, hostels, hostile, hostler, howlets, loathes, loutish, ooliths, phytols, shallot, shortly, soothly, splotch, thymols. | |
+3 letters: althorns, anethols, blotches, brothels, bullshot, calathos, cholates, cholents, chortles, eschalot, ethanols, ethoxyls, fishbolt, fleshpot, haplonts, haylofts, heelpost, helistop, helotism, hilltops, holdfast, holdouts, holibuts, holistic, holstein, holsters, homilist, honestly, hooklets, hoplites, hospital, hosteled, hosteler, hostelry, hostiles, hostlers, hotlines, isopleth, lekythos, lithosol, loathers, lothsome, menthols, naphtols, neoliths, otoliths, outblush, outhauls, outhowls, pesthole, posthole, potholes, ratholes, selcouth, shallots, shoalest, shoplift, shoptalk, shouldst, slothful, smoothly, splotchy, tallyhos, tapholes, thallous, theelols, theologs, thiazols, thionyls, thowless, throstle, toeholds, tonishly, toolshed, trochils, uroliths, whitlows, whortles, woolhats. | |
| Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. SCRABBLE® is a registered trademark. All intellectual property rights in and to the game are owned in the U.S.A and Canada by Hasbro Inc., and throughout the rest of the world by J.W. Spear & Sons Limited of Maidenhead, Berkshire, England, a subsidiary of Mattel Inc. Mattel and Spear are not affiliated with Hasbro. | |
| 1. Definition 2. Synonyms 3. Crosswords 4. Usage: Modern | 5. Usage: Commercial 6. Images: Slideshow 7. Images: Photo Album 8. Quotations: Familiar | 9. Quotations: Fiction 10. Usage Frequency 11. Expressions 12. Expressions: Internet | 13. Translations: Modern 14. Translations: Ancient 15. Derivations 16. Rhymes | 17. Anagrams 18. Bibliography |
Copyright © Philip M. Parker, INSEAD. Terms of Use.
