Etymology

sleet

S1L1E1E1T1

Today it means: Pellets of ice made of mostly-frozen raindrops or refrozen melted snowflakes. Full definition →

Middle English slete ← Old English *slēte ← Proto-West Germanic *slautijā
Ask AI about its historyChatGPTClaudePerplexityGoogle AIGrok

The story

  1. Old Norse · derived fromslydda
  2. Proto-Germanic · inherited from*slautijǭ“sleet”
  3. Proto-West Germanic · inherited from*slautijā
  4. Old English · inherited from*slēte
  5. Middle English · inherited fromslete
  6. English todaysleet

From Middle English slete, probably from Old English *slēte, *slȳte, *slīete, from Proto-West Germanic *slautijā, from Proto-Germanic *slautijǭ (“sleet”). Walter W. Skeat, the author of Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, suggests Old Norse slydda (whence Danish slud (“mixture of rain and snow”)). The word appears to be akin to Low German Sloot (“hail”), dialectal German Schloße (“large hailstone”), Old Gutnish sloyta (“slush, sleet”). Doublet of slut.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.