- 1偵探（偏小說、玩味的說法，不是警察上班時的自稱）
A sleuth is someone who tries to find out the truth about a crime — a detective. The word has a storybook, slightly old-fashioned flavour. Police officers almost never introduce themselves as sleuths at work; you meet it in novels, headlines, and jokes, and often with amateur: a neighbour who cannot leave a mystery alone. It is also a verb: to sleuth is to hunt for clues, quietly, maybe online, maybe by asking around. Though actually, it is a short form of an older word, sleuthhound, a dog that follows a scent. First the dog, then the person. Do not mix it with sloth, the slow animal, or sloth meaning — they only look a little alike, and they are not related.
組成It is a clipping of sleuthhound. A sleuthhound was a tracking dog that follows a smell. People then used the short word for a person who hunts for the truth about a crime.
同家族的字
- sleuthhoundthe old full word — first a tracking dog, then the person
原始詞典資料6 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
sleuthnoun詞源 1/sluːθ/
- 1
A detective.
- 1908, Edith Van Dyne (Frank L. Baum), Aunt Jane’s Nieces at Millville Do ye want me to become a sleuth, or engage detectives to track the objects of your erroneous philanthropy?
- “This is a great piece of sleuth work for sure, and it significantly advances efforts to understand the origin of SARS-CoV-2,” said Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona who was not involved in the study.
- 2
archaicA sleuthhound; a bloodhound.
- 3
obsoleteAn animal’s trail or track.
sleuthverb詞源 1/sluːθ/
- 1
To act as a detective; to try to discover who committed a crime, or, more generally, to solve a mystery.
- We must discover where he lives, what he does — sleuth him, in fact!
sleuthnoun詞源 2/sluːθ/
- 1
obsoleteSlowness; laziness, sloth.
- 2
rareA group of bears.
- As quietly as if I were practicing to join a sleuth of bears, I crept out the door and went on home, eventually winding up in the garage…
- If these dainty adventurers weren’t being chased by a sleuth of bears or bogeys, they were being captured by Gypsies or thieves.
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。