Other forms: sliding, slides, slid
A slide is the smooth metal or plastic hill in a playground. You climb the ladder, sit down at the top, and gravity does the rest of the work.
Slide is a verb before it is anything else: things slide when they move smoothly over a surface without lifting off it. A glass slides down a tilted tray, a drawer slides out, children slide across a wet kitchen floor in their socks. The forms are slide, slid, slid — never slided. In a talk your slides are the pages on the screen behind you, under a microscope a slide is the thin piece of glass the sample sits on, and in the loft there is a box of photographic slides nobody can look at any more. When prices or standards slide they are getting worse slowly, and if you let things slide you have stopped keeping them up.
1nounslideA smooth sloping structure that children sit on and go down.~25%
“He went down the slide four times and then wanted an ice cream.”
2verbglideTo move smoothly across a surface.~25%
“The drawer slides out if you pull the handle at the bottom.”
3nounpageOne page of a presentation shown on a screen.~13%
“Go back to the slide with the map on it.”
4nounthinA thin piece of glass holding something to be looked at under a microscope.~25%
“He put the sample on a slide and clipped it under the lens.”
5verbworseTo get worse slowly and steadily.~12%
“Standards began to slide once the inspections stopped.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 15 sentences found in the wild and placed 8 of them on a sense (7 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
slide is a piece of playground equipment.
Slide has no clean paper trail into English, but its relatives sit all over the old Germanic languages: Old High German slitan, Middle Dutch and Middle Low German sliden, all meaning to slide, and German schlittern today. The strangest cousin is Vedic Sanskrit sredhati, to err or to blunder — the same picture English keeps when a person slips up.
Middle English
sliden
English, today
slide
From Middle English sliden. Cognate with Old High German slītan (“to slide”) (whence German schlittern), Middle Low German slīden (“to slide”), Middle Dutch slīden (“to slide”) (whence Dutch slijderen, frequentative of now obsolete slijden), sa-ved स्रेधति (“to err, blunder”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA