sicker
English
Pronunciation
- (General American) IPA(key): /ˈsɪkɚ/
- Rhymes: -ɪkə(ɹ)
Audio (US) (file)
Etymology 1
From Middle English siker, sikker, sykkere, secre, seccre, from Old English sēocra (“sicker”), equivalent to sick + -er.
Etymology 2
From Middle English siker, from Old English sicer, sicor, from Proto-West Germanic *sikur (“free, secure”), from Latin sēcūrus (“secure”, literally “without care”). Doublet of sure and secure.
Adjective
sicker
- (obsolete outside dialects) Certain.
- I'm sicker that he's not home.
- (obsolete outside dialects) Secure, safe.
- To walk a sicker path
- 1579, Immeritô [pseudonym; Edmund Spenser], “September. Ægloga Nona.”, in The Shepheardes Calender: […], London: […] Hugh Singleton, […], →OCLC; reprinted as H[einrich] Oskar Sommer, editor, The Shepheardes Calender […], London: John C. Nimmo, […], 1890, →OCLC, folio 36, recto:
- But ſicker ſo it is, as the bꝛight ſtarre / Seemeth ay greater, when it is farre:
Derived terms
- sickerly
- sickerhood
- sickerness
Etymology 3
From Middle English *sikeren (attested only as sikeriez (“(it) trickles, (it) leaks, (it) oozes”)), from Old English sicerian (“to ooze, seep”), from Proto-West Germanic *sikarōn, from Proto-Germanic *sikarōną (“to trickle”), from Proto-Germanic *sīką (“slow running water”). Cognate with German Low German sickern (“to seep”), German sickern (“to seep, trickle”). Akin also to English sitch.
Verb
sicker (third-person singular simple present sickers, present participle sickering, simple past and past participle sickered)
- (intransitive, literal, figurative) To percolate, trickle, or seep; to ooze, as water through a crack.
- 1917, Gerhart Hauptmann, Ludwig Lewisohn, The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann, volume 7, page 185:
- No drop of water fell from the hot blue
Or sickered from the skeleton of earth.
- 1926, Jakob Wassermann, Wedlock, volume 10, page 217:
- This cause had sickered into his soul; it had been branded upon his forehead somehow, by some hand; he knew not how nor by whom.
- 1943, Acta minerologica, petrographica, volumes 1-11, page 17:
- The solution steadily sickered through the debris and the sampling of the solutions could be carried out without taking the equipment into pieces.
Part or all of this entry has been imported from the 1913 edition of Webster’s Dictionary, which is now free of copyright and hence in the public domain. The imported definitions may be significantly out of date, and any more recent senses may be completely missing.
(See the entry for “sicker”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.)
References
- “sicker”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.
- “sicker”, in The Century Dictionary […], New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911, →OCLC.
German
Pronunciation
Audio (file)