Other forms: slats
A slat is one of the thin narrow strips in a blind or a fence. Broken slat, wooden slats, bed slats.
Turning them is what makes a venetian blind work, because light and sight are blocked at every angle except along the strips. Bed slats hold the mattress and spread the load. The word came from an Old French word meaning a splinter.
1nounslatOne of the thin narrow strips in a blind or fence.
“Sunlight came through the slats of the wooden blind.”
slat is a strip.
Old French esclat means a splinter or piece split off, from esclater, to burst. Slate is a relative.
Old French
esclat — piece broken or split off, shiver, splinter
Middle English
slatte
English, today
slat
From Middle English slatte, sklatte, sklat, sclat, from Old French esclat (“piece broken or split off, shiver, splinter”), from Old French esclater (“to split, burst”), from Frankish slaitijan (“to split, break”), from Proto-Germanic slītaną (“to rend, split”). a doublet of slate and éclat.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA