Other forms: slighter, slightest, slightly, slighted
Slight means small enough that you nearly miss it. A slight limp on the stairs, a slight smell of burning from the kitchen, a slight change in her voice on the phone that you only catch an hour afterwards. Nothing there worth stopping for, and every one of them worth noticing.
The adverb slightly is the form you will meet most: the soup is slightly too salty, the train is slightly late, the door is slightly open. Then there is a colder use, formal and a little literary: a slight is a small public act of disrespect, and to be slighted is to be passed over and to feel it for years. Not in the slightest means not at all. Keep slight for degree rather than for the size of a thing — a slight box means nothing, but a slight difference between two boxes is exactly right. People are the one exception: a slight man is a thin one, lost in a coat two sizes too big for him.
1adjectiveslightSmall in amount or degree, and hard to notice.~94%
“There is a slight delay on the line this morning.”
2adjectiveslenderOf a person: thin and lightly built.~2%
“A slight woman in a green coat opened the door.”
synonyms: slender, slim
3nounmannersA small act of disrespect that is felt, and remembered.~2%
“He never forgave the slight, though nobody else remembered it.”
4verbtreatTo treat someone as unimportant, and to hurt them by doing it.~2%
“She felt slighted by an invitation that never arrived.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 115 sentences found in the wild and placed 91 of them on a sense (24 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
s-LIGHT → a LIGHT touch
One hair lies on the table. Your finger comes down with a touch so light that you feel nothing, and the hair rolls half a finger and stops.
hooks ontolight
Old English sliht meant smooth and level, and the Germanic word behind it meant slippery, flat, plain — the same root that gives English slick. By Middle English it was carrying both halves at once: smooth and slender on one side, poor and trivial on the other. Dutch and German kept the second half, where slecht and schlecht simply mean bad. English kept the first, and slight settled into meaning not much of a thing.
Proto-Germanic
*slihtaz — slippery, flat, level, plain
Old English
sliht — smooth, level
Middle English
slight — bad, of poor quality, unimportant, trivial, slender, slim, smooth, level
English, today
slight
From Middle English slight (“bad, of poor quality, unimportant, trivial, slender, slim, smooth, level”), from Old English sliht (“smooth, level”), from Proto-Germanic slihtaz (“slippery, flat, level, plain”), related to English slick. Cognate with Scots slicht (“bad, of poor quality”), West Frisian sljocht (“smooth, level, plain, simple”), Dutch slecht (“bad”), Low German slecht (“bad”), German schlecht (“bad”) and schlicht (“plain, artless, natural”), Danish slet (“bad, evil, poor, nasty, wrong”), Swedish slät (“smooth”), Norwegian Bokmål and Norwegian Nynorsk slett (“even”), Icelandic sléttur (“even, smooth, level”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA