Senior managing editor and logophile Andy Hollandbeck reveals the sometimes surprising roots of common English words and phrases. Remember: Etymology tells us where a word comes from, but not what it means today.
From the days of Sir Conan Doyle, through the animated bumbling brilliance of Scooby-Doo and his friends, right up to the current third season of a TV show about a crime podcast that solves Only Murders in the Building, mysteries have long been a well-loved escape from life’s drudgeries.
And in all that time, many a detective — amateur and pro alike — has been referred to as a sleuth. Such sleuths are always sleuthing around, trying to sleuth out the guilty party. But have you ever noticed how odd a word that is? You’d be hard-pressed to find other words that begin with sleu-; I found only three, and they are far from common. Sleumeria and Sleumerodendron are each a genus of plant named for Dutch botanist Hermann Otto Sleumer. The third word is sleugh, which Merriam-Webster defines only as “British spelling of slough.”
So I decided to, ahem, sleuth out for myself what’s up with this peculiar word.
Sleuth began as the Old Norse word sloð, which meant “the track or trail of man or beast,” as might be left behind in the snow. If you were hunting, you might follow such a sloð. The final character in that word is the letter eth, which was used in Old English as well. Though it and the letter thorn (þ) were essentially interchangeable in Old English, in past languages they were used to indicate the two ways to pronounce what we now spell as th. (Consider the difference between “wither” and “with her.”)
As the eth disappeared from the English alphabet, sloð, which was adopted into Old English and Scottish around the 12th century, became sloth — and eventually sleuth. In Scotland, a bloodhound used to track down escaped fugitives (by sniffing out the escapee’s sloð), was called a sleuth-hound, which in the 19th century was applied to human detectives and then shortened to just sleuth — because who likes to be called a dog?
When I saw that sleuth came from something once written as sloth, I was struck by the ridiculous image of one of those super-slow, three-toed, tree-hanging South American mammals being used to track down felons. As it turns out, there isn’t an etymological connection between the two words, though there is some weirdness.
Sloth began as the Old English name of one of the Seven Deadly Sins, but in Old English it was slæwþ, using the letter thorn. But as the thorn disappeared, slæwþ was sometimes written as — surprise surprise! — sleuthe. Ultimately, though, the word is simply a combination of slow and the -th ending. In Middle English, slow was slou, and so we find slouth, which became sloth.
The animal wasn’t called a sloth until the second decade of the 1600s, from a translation of the Portuguese word for it.
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