See also: pothole (def. 3a)
- This meaning of slough, invariably pronounced [slu], is peculiar to the West and Northwest, roughly between the Lakehead and the Rockies. In B.C. the term, usually pronounced [slu], has taken on other meanings. In the East slough, usually pronounced [slaŹ] if used at all, is for most people a book word.
- 1860  These sloughs are temporarily filled up with hay, a couple of loads of which being thrown into them, make a kind of floating bridge on the top of the mud--perfectly safe, economical, and expeditious.
- 1909  In front of the old camp-fire was a little slough or lake, and this seemed a promising place to look for evidence.
- 1948  On the prairies everything is a slough (pronounced slew): you cut hay in the slough, the little morainic lake is a slough, and so is the bleak waste of shining alkali on black mud. . . . It is not readily apparent how this name came to the prairies. It seems to have been in common use in England in the time of Bunyan (John not Paul) and his "Slough of Despond"; but appears to have skipped over all the swamps between the Atlantic and Lake Winnipeg to find an abiding home on the prairie.
- 1962  Prairie grain growers often regard a pothole or pond or slough on their land as a soggy nuisance.
2a n. B.C. a low-lying meadow subject to flooding during spring runoffs and productive in hay.
See also: slough meadow
- 1860  This slough will be worked until the river commences to rise, when it will have to be abandoned for high-water diggings.
- 1887  (1888)  . . . one morning the lodge was pitched by a little brook, in a pretty grassy valley libelled under the name of mud slough.
- 1905  The sloughs were full of water, the trails thick with soft and sticky mire.
2b n. B.C. a widening in a creek to create a mud-bottomed, swampy stretch.
See also: slough-creek
- 1858  A trail had to be made over high mountains, through ten inches of snow, wade sloughs waist deep; the cold was intense, and the underbrush thick and passed with difficulty.
- 1955  At the Pan Meadow . . . two small, mud-bottomed creeks merged into a long, dangerous slough where several springs bubbled up out of the mud.
2c n. an inlet; lagoon.