sleuth

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /sluːθ/[1]
• (General American) IPA^(key): /sluːθ/
• Rhymes: -uːθ

• Audio (Southern England)

  (file)

Clipping of sleuthhound.

sleuth (plural sleuths)

1. A detective.

   Synonyms: detective, gumshoe, investigator, dick, private eye

   • 1908, Edith Van Dyne (Frank L. Baum), Aunt Jane’s Nieces at Millville

     Do ye want me to become a sleuth, or engage detectives to track the objects of your erroneous philanthropy?

   • 2021 June 23, Carl Zimmer, quoting Michael Worobey, “Scientist Finds Early Virus Sequences That Had Been Mysteriously Deleted”, in The New York Times‎, →ISSN:

     “This is a great piece of sleuth work for sure, and it significantly advances efforts to understand the origin of SARS-CoV-2,” said Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona who was not involved in the study.

2. (archaic) A sleuthhound; a bloodhound.
3. (obsolete) An animal’s trail or track.

sleuth (third-person singular simple present sleuths, present participle sleuthing, simple past and past participle sleuthed)

1. (intransitive, transitive) To act as a detective; to try to discover who committed a crime, or, more generally, to solve a mystery.
   • 1922, Agatha Christie, The Secret Adversary:

     We must discover where he lives, what he does — sleuth him, in fact!

• shadow

From Old English slǣwþ, corresponding to slow + -th.

sleuth (plural sleuths)

1. (obsolete, uncountable) Slowness; laziness, sloth.

   Synonyms: idleness, inertia, laziness, lethargy, sloth, slothfulness

2. (rare, collective) A group of bears.

   Synonym: sloth

   • 1961, Noel Perrin, A Passport Secretly Green, page 89:

     As quietly as if I were practicing to join a sleuth of bears, I crept out the door and went on home, eventually winding up in the garage…

   • 1995, Bobbie Ann Mason, The Girl Sleuth, page 13:

     If these dainty adventurers weren’t being chased by a sleuth of bears or bogeys, they were being captured by Gypsies or thieves.

   • 2007, Elinor DeWire, The Lightkeepers’ Menagerie: Stories of Animals at Lighthouses, page 200:

     From the darkness came the howls of routs of wolves and bands of coyotes, the rumbling growls of a sleuth of bears or the bugles of a gang of elk.

• sloth
• Appendix:Animals

• Hulets, Lesuth, Lueths, hustle