Word of the Day

: January 28, 2019

sleuth

verb SLOOTH

What It Means

1 : to act as a detective : search for information

2 : to search for and discover

sleuth in Context

"Farmer would go sleuthing in the archives of Arizona State University's Center for Meteorite Studies to find evidence of an undiscovered landfall in Canada, and Ward could build a rig that trailed an 11-foot metal detector behind a combine, which is how they unearthed $1 million in pallasite fragments from several square miles of Alberta farmland." — Joshuah Bearman and Allison Keeley, Wired, January 2019

"For more than five decades, Morse has sleuthed out long-lost family trees for a living. From his home base here in Haywood, Morse travels the world tracking down missing heirs." — Becky Johnson, The Mountaineer (Haywood County, North Carolina), 20 Nov. 2018

Did You Know?

"They were the footprints of a gigantic hound!" Those canine tracks in Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles set the great Sherlock Holmes sleuthing on the trail of a murderer. It was a case of art imitating etymology. When Middle English speakers first borrowed sleuth from Old Norse, the term referred to "the track of an animal or person." In Scotland, sleuthhound referred to a bloodhound used to hunt game or track down fugitives from justice. In 19th-century U.S. English, sleuthhound became an epithet for a detective and was soon shortened to sleuth. From there, it was only a short leap to turning sleuth into a verb describing what a sleuth does.