Other forms: slammers
Slammer is an informal word for prison. From the sound of the door.
It belongs to crime films and to jokes rather than to anything official, and being in the slammer is said lightly, which is why nobody uses it about a real sentence somebody is serving. English has an unusually large collection of these, including nick, clink and the cooler, and each carries its own era. There is a completely separate bar sense, since a slammer is a drink slammed on the counter to make it fizz.
1nounslammerPrison.
“He spent two years in the slammer.”
Old Norse
slæma
Middle English
*slammen
English
slam
English, today
slammer
Built from
From slam + -er. slam comes from Middle English slammen not recorded, apparently from a Scandinavian source ultimately from Old Norse slæma, slœma (“to slam, swing a weapon, strike an object out of reach”), related to Old Norse slamra, slambra (“to slam”). Cognate with Norwegian Bokmål slamre (“to slam”), Swedish slamra (“to pound, beat, make a clatter, rattle”), Norwegian Nynorsk slamra (“to sway, dangle”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA