# slug

> English word · Noun · IPA /slʌɡ/ · frequency rank #19,465

## Definitions
1. Any of many gastropod mollusks, having no (or only a rudimentary) shell.
2. A slow, lazy person; a sluggard.
3. A bullet or other projectile fired from a firearm; in modern usage, generally refers to a shotgun slug.
4. A solid block or piece of roughly shaped metal.
5. A counterfeit coin, especially one used to steal from vending machines.
6. A shot of a drink, usually alcoholic.
7. A title, name or header, a catchline, a short phrase or title to indicate the content of a newspaper or magazine story for editing use.
8. The imperial (English) unit of mass that accelerates by 1 foot per second squared (1 ft/s²) when a force of one pound-force (lbf) is exerted on it.
9. A discrete mass of a material that moves as a unit, usually through another material.
10. A motile pseudoplasmodium formed by amoebae working together.
11. An accessory to a diesel-electric locomotive, used to increase adhesive weight and allow full power to be applied at a lower speed. It has trucks with traction motors, but lacks a prime mover, being powered by electricity from the mother locomotive, and may or may not have a control cab.
12. A black screen used to separate broadcast items.
13. A piece of type metal imprinted by a linotype machine; also a black mark placed in the margin to indicate an error; also said in application to typewriters; type slug.
14. A stranger picked up as a passenger to enable legal use of high occupancy vehicle lanes.
15. A hitchhiking commuter.
16. The last part of a clean URL, the displayed resource name, similar to a filename.
17. A hindrance, an obstruction.
18. A ship that sails slowly.
19. A block of text at the beginning of a scene that sets up the scene's location, characters, etc.
20. An infertile egg of a reptile.

## Etymology
Originally referred to a slow, lazy person, from Middle English slugge (“lazy person", also "sloth, slothfulness”), probably of either Old English or Old Norse origin; perhaps ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *sliǵ-ōn, from *sley- (“smooth; slick; sticky; slimy”) or otherwise from the root of Old Norse slókr (“lazy person, oaf”), whence Icelandic slókur (“laziness”).
Compare Norn slug (“lazy, slothful, sluggish”), dialectal Norwegian slugg (“a large, heavy body”), sluggje (“heavy, slow person”), Danish slog (“rascal, rogue”). Compare also Dutch slak (“snail, slug”). Doublet of slotch.
The sense of a hitchhiking commuter is from the sense of a counterfeit bus token. Bus operators considered sluggers to be cheating as if they were using counterfeit tokens.

## Easily confused with
- **su** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/slug-vs-su)
- **sun** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/slug-vs-sun)
- **sub** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/slug-vs-sub)
- **sum** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/slug-vs-sum)
- **sue** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/slug-vs-sue)
- **SUV** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/slug-vs-suv)
- **sup** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/slug-vs-sup)
- **sly** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/slug-vs-sly)
- **Stu** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/slug-vs-stu)
- **Sus** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/slug-vs-sus)
- **Sui** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/slug-vs-sui)
- **suh** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/slug-vs-suh)
- **Sul** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/slug-vs-sul)
- **sou** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/slug-vs-sou)
- **sud** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/slug-vs-sud)
- **SVG** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/slug-vs-svg)
- **song** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/slug-vs-song)
- **soul** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/slug-vs-soul)
- **soup** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/slug-vs-soup)
- **sung** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/slug-vs-sung)

## Common misspellings (6)
`lsug`, `slgu`, `sllug`, `slugg`, `sslug`, `sulg`

## Source
Compiled from Wiktionary via kaikki.org (CC BY-SA). Data vintage: 2026-05-06.
Canonical page: https://plainspell.com/en/word/slug