Sliver
//ˈslɪv.ɚ// noun, verb
noun, verb ·Common ·High school level
Definitions
Noun
- 1 A long piece cut or rent off; a sharp, slender fragment.
"This is the tasting ritual, the lay Eucharist of cheese. The buyer squeezes the sliver of cheese between his fingers to test its consistency, sniffs it, and then tastes it as delicately as if it were the most subtle caviar."
- 2 a thin fragment or slice (especially of wood) that has been shaved from something wordnet
- 3 A long piece cut or rent off; a sharp, slender fragment.; Specifically, a splinter caught under the skin. Canada, Essex, Kent
- 4 a small thin sharp bit of wood or glass or metal wordnet
- 5 A strand, or slender roll, of cotton or other fiber in a loose, untwisted state, produced by a carding machine and ready for the roving or slubbing which precedes spinning.
Show 3 more definitions
- 6 Bait made of pieces of small fish.
- 7 A narrow high-rise apartment building. New-York, US
- 8 A small amount of something; a drop in the bucket; a shred.
Verb
- 1 To cut or divide into long, thin pieces, or into very small pieces; to cut or rend lengthwise; to slit. transitive
"to sliver wood"
- 2 form into slivers wordnet
- 3 break up into splinters or slivers wordnet
- 4 divide into slivers or splinters wordnet
Antonyms
All antonymsExample
More examples"Our evidence is no more than a tiny sliver of solid knowledge amidst the vast bog of doubts and speculations."
Etymology
From Middle English slivere, sliver from Middle English sliven (“to cut, cleave, split”), from Old English slīfan (as in tōslīfan (“to split, split up”)).
Related phrases
More for "sliver"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.