Other forms: sliders
A slider is a control you drag along a track to set a value. Move the slider, a volume slider, drag the slider.
It suits continuous values where a number box suits exact ones, and it is hard to use precisely with a finger, which is why good designs show the number alongside. In American food a slider is a small burger; in baseball it is a pitch that breaks late. Note slide, from which it comes.
1nounsliderA control you drag along a track to set a value.
“Drag the slider to the right to turn up the volume.”
2nounsmallA small burger, in American use.
“We ordered a plate of beef sliders and fries to share.”
slider is a control.
Slide plus -er. The burger and the baseball pitch are separate senses of the same word.
Middle English
sliden
English
slide
English, today
slider
From slide + -er. The meaning "small hamburger" was originally used to describe onion-steamed small burgers at White Castle restaurants, formerly spelt "Slyder". Regarding the senses about control devices or widgets: physical sliders (potentiometers serving as rheostats) predate virtual ones (elements in graphical user interfaces), and the virtual ones are so named because their concept is the abstraction of the physical ones; if more explanation on that topic is needed, it is available in the Wikipedia articles on skeuomorphs, icons, and the desktop metaphor. slide comes 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