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slab

UK/slæb/US/slæb/
nounB2Common in everyday speech and writing · #6,201 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: slabs

A slab is a thick flat piece of stone or other material. A stone slab, a concrete slab, a slab of chocolate.

In building, a slab is the whole flat floor poured in one piece, and it is the commonest foundation for a modern house. On a mortuary table the word is grim slang. Its origin is unknown, which is unusual for so plain a word.

369srr528 · CC0

Definitions of slab

  1. 1nounslabA thick flat piece of stone or other material.B2

    “The garden path was made of large stone slabs.”

slab is a flat piece.

Where it comes from

Middle English slabbe, of unknown origin.

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *(s)leyb-

  2. Proto-Germanic

    *slaipaz

  3. Old Norse

    sleipr

  4. Middle English

    sclabbe

  5. English, today

    slab

Built from

  • slappel · Middle English — portion, piece
  • slape · Middle English — slippery
  • sleip · Middle English — smooth piece of timber

From Middle English sclabbe, slabbe, of unknown origin; possibly from slap, related to dialectal slappel (“portion, piece”), along with slape (“slippery”), sleip (“smooth piece of timber”), borrowed through Old Norse sleipr from Proto-Germanic slaipaz, from Proto-Indo-European (s)leyb-. See also Norwegian sleip (“slippery”) and Icelandic sleipur.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire

Practise this word

slab in the wild

  • Grinding slabs used for plant processing typically acted as a coarse surface against which plant materials were ground using a portable hand stone, or mano ("hand" in Spanish).

    Grinding slab

  • Variant grinding slabs are referred to as metates or querns, and have a ground-out bowl.

    Grinding slab

  • The down-going slab sinks into the mantle largely under its own weight.

    Subduction

  • In many domestic and industrial buildings, a thick concrete slab supported on foundations or directly on the subsoil, is used to construct the ground floor.

    Concrete slab

  • A slab is ground-bearing if it rests directly on the foundation, otherwise the slab is suspended.

    Concrete slab

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.