Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun An untidy, dirty woman.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A woman who is negligent of her dress, or who suffers her clothes and household furniture to be in disorder; one who is not neat and nice; a slut.
  • Pertaining to or characteristic of a slattern; slovenly; slatternly.
  • To consume carelessly or idly; waste: with away.

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

  • noun A woman who is negligent of her dress or house; one who is not neat and nice.
  • adjective Resembling a slattern; sluttish; slatterny.
  • transitive verb rare To consume carelessly or wastefully; to waste; -- with away.

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

  • noun A slut.

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

  • noun a dirty untidy woman
  • noun a prostitute who attracts customers by walking the streets

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Perhaps from dialectal slattering, slovenly, present participle of dialectal slatter, to slop.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Dating from the seventeenth century; related to slattering ("slovenly"), from the dialectal verb slatter ("to slop, to spill").

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Examples

  • I fancy my predecessor must have been a "slattern," for everything was thick with dust.

    In the Ranks of the C.I.V. Erskine Childers 1896

  • While "slattern" and "French letter" are dated, they made me think of those cute nicknames parents give the vagina, labia, penis, and scrotum when talking to their kids.

    feminist blogs 2008

  • When we first see her in Minneapolis, a slattern in a junk-strewn apartment, she's living on scraps of loveless sex, drinking too much and picking up snatches of kids' conversations here and there, then dropping them into her chronicles of Kendall Strickland, the teenage heroine of a series called Waverly Prep that is, in fact, headed for the dustbin of subliterary history.

    Nervy 'Young Adult' Dazzles by the Book Joe Morgenstern 2011

  • I am clearly an unorganized slattern of the worst sort..

    Updatery girliejones 2010

  • I am also curious how you brought the old slattern back.

    Zombies vs. Unicorns Justine Larbalestier 2010

  • And aII because Mrs Huffmaster, a barefoot slattern with half a dozen snottering brats at her heels, "came a-callin"', peeping round Annie on the porch to get a look inside, and remarking slyly "what a smart lot o' shirts your men-folk has ", when we'd carelessly put all our washing out at once, and there were clothes for fifteen or twenty fluttering on the green.

    THE NUMBERS 2010

  • Why would I be jealous just because I saw you pawing some slattern in the kitchen yard?

    The Devil Wears Plaid Teresa Medeiros 2010

  • An American cackle, piercing my ear, and I shuddered away by instinct, which was sound judgment, for if I felt dreadful, she looked worse, a raddled slattern grinning her stinking breath into my face, reaching out a fat hand across my chest.

    THE NUMBERS 2010

  • In the perverse way of teenagers, she enjoyed the odd freedom of the scarlet S (for slut, slattern, skank) which she got to (pretend to) wear around the house for the last months she was there.

    The Beginning and End of Comedy 2009

  • You are clearly becoming a slattern, and my royal court is run by a hedgerow slut, just as my mother warned me.

    The White Queen Philippa Gregory 2009

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