Definitions

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective Inclining or inclined from the plane of the horizon, or from a horizontal or other right line; oblique; declivous; slanting.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective Having a slope.
  • verb Present participle of slope.
  • noun An arrangement or motion by which something slopes.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • adjective having a slanting form or direction
  • adjective having an oblique or slanted direction

Etymologies

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Examples

  • Ice sloping from a bank may trap air underneath, reducing its strength.

    Safety Tips for Fishing Late-Winter Ice 2007

  • A few miles out from Kansas City, Missouri State, on a pleasant plain sloping off toward a murmuring stream, a branch of the mighty river, early in the spring of 1856, stood a rambling frame house two stories high, surrounded with piazzas, over which trailed grape-vines, clematis and Virginia creepers.

    Winona: A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest Pauline Elizabeth 1902

  • Second, an obliquity of the interior part of the brain or skull -- in fact, a continuation upward of what is usually termed a sloping forehead; third, a distinct lessening of the posterior cerebral lobes, so that, as in the lower animals, they are not large enough to hide the cerebellum.

    Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 Volume 1, Number 2 1856

  • But here I had like to have dipped all my cargo into the sea again; for that shore lying pretty steep -- that is to say sloping -- there was no place to land, but where one end of my float, if it ran on shore, would lie so high, and the other sink lower, as before, that it would endanger my cargo again.

    The Junior Classics — Volume 5 William Patten 1902

  • But here I had like to have dipped all my cargo into the sea again; for that shore lying pretty steep-that is to say sloping-there was no place to land, but where one end of my float, if it ran on shore, would lie so high, and the other sink lower, as before, that it would endanger my cargo again.

    Robinson Crusoe 1719

  • Now, however, the yield curve is upwardly sloping, meaning long-term rates are higher than short-term rates again.

    Treasury Yield, 2007

  • The little pink sloth-creature dashed at me, and I gashed down its ugly face with the nail in my stick and in another minute was scrambling up a steep side pathway, a kind of sloping chimney, out of the ravine.

    The Island of Doctor Moreau Herbert George 2006

  • Our party had just emerged from one of these defiles and were standing together on a kind of sloping platform, at which point the declivity seemed to become more precipitous as it receded from our sight, when our attention was suddenly arrested by the reappearance of the mysterious naked footprints which I had before observed in the chamber of skeletons.

    A Peep into Toorkisthhan Rollo Gillespie Burslem

  • All affectations in writing should be avoided, such as sloping one's hand to the left, the use of flourishes, undue size in the characters, or a diminutiveness of the same to try eyesight and patience.

    Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society A condensed but thorough treatise on etiquette and its usages in America, containing plain and reliable directions for deportment in every situation in life. Sarah Annie Frost

  • The party had landed on a kind of sloping beach, probably worn by the action of the sun, and what is even more destructive, the wash of the sea-waves, and ascending found that the floe was nearly level for an area of at least half a square mile, forming a kind of ice-meadow, surrounded on three sides by sloping hills twenty feet higher.

    Adrift in the Ice-Fields Charles W. Hall

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