slush

UK/slʌʃ/US/slʌʃ/

nounB2Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #10,351 of 15,258neutral

Slush is half-melted snow lying dirty on the ground. Grey, wet, and it gets into your shoes.

It arrives a day after the snow and is thoroughly unloved. The adjective slushy describes both the ground and, quite separately, sentimental films and songs, since a slushy romance is sickly sweet. A slush fund is a reserve of money kept for questionable purposes, from an old naval practice of selling waste fat. American English has the slush pile, meaning unsolicited manuscripts nobody has read yet.

Definitions of slush

1nounslushPartly melted, dirty snow.B2
“The pavements were ankle deep in slush.”

Where it comes from

May be a variant of sludge or imitative of the sound like slosh. Perhaps a confluence of both influences.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Man Called Ove, Weather & Seasons

First appears in chapter 37 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

slush in the wild

Use of slush funds to influence government activities may be viewed as subversive of the democratic process.
Slush fund
Website Youwriteon acts as a slush pile filter for Random House, Orion Publishing Group and Bloomsbury Publishing.
Slush pile
After being ejected into the atmosphere, the liquid water and slush freeze and fall back to the surface, growing the formation.
Ice volcano
A variation on the typical gravity casting process, called slush casting, produces hollow castings.
Permanent mold casting
Cold-weather biking, cold-weather cycling, or winter biking is the use of a bicycle during months when roads and paths are covered with ice, slush and snow.
Cold-weather biking

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

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