''slaver'' ▫ᴱᴺ Entries

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''slaver'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260227164232-00-⌔

slaver - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Verb

slaver (third-person singular simple present slavers, present participle slavering, simple past and past participle slavered)

• (intransitive) To drool saliva from the mouth; to slobber.
• (intransitive) To fawn.
• (intransitive, of saliva) To be drooled out of someone’s mouth.
  • ✤ A fearsome sight it was to behold how he swelled in his wrath, and his eyes blazed like disastrous stars at midnight, and being wood with anger he gnashed his teeth till the froth stood at his lips and slavered down his chin.¹
• (transitive) To smear with saliva issuing from the mouth.
• To be besmeared with saliva.
  • ✤ should I, damn’d then,/Slaver with lips as common as the stairs/That mount the Capitol²

Noun

slaver (uncountable)

• Saliva running from the mouth; drool.
  • ✤ Of all mad Creatures, if the Learn’d are right,/It is the Slaver kills, and not the Bite.³
  • ✤ He went over to it, held it in his hands awhile, feeling its coolness, smelling the clammy slaver of the lather in which the brush was stuck.⁴

Noun

slaver (plural slavers)

• A person engaged in the slave trade; a person who buys, sells, transports, or owns slaves.
  • ✤ The continued fight between abolitionists and slavers in Missouri caused slave owners to refuge slaves to the Confederate interior. But some Union forces that made salients into rebel territory insisted that the slaves were “contraband” […]⁵
  • A white slaver; a person who sells prostitutes into sexual slavery.
• (nautical) A ship used to transport slaves.
  • ✤ The Gulnare was a fast sailer, built for a slaver originally[.]⁶
  • ✤ Somewhat unsurprisingly, unleashing the most powerful navy on the planet with carte blanche to exterminate slavers on sight saw a dramatic and sudden collapse in slaver numbers in the late 1840s and early 1850s.⁷

Etymology 1

From Middle English slaveren, from Old Norse slafra (“to slaver”), probably imitative. Doublet of slabber.

Pronunciation

• (UK) IPA: /ˈslævə/
  • Audio (Southern England): 🔊
• (US) enPR: slăvʹər, IPA: /ˈslævɚ/
• Rhymes: -ævə(ɹ)

Etymology 2

From slave (“enslave, traffic in slaves”) + -er.

Pronunciation

• (UK) enPR: slāʹvə, IPA: /ˈsleɪvə/
  • Audio (Southern England): 🔊
• (US) enPR: slāʹvər, IPA: /ˈsleɪvɚ/

Printed 2026-06-28.

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Footnotes

1. 1922, E[ric] R[ücker] Eddison, The Worm Ouroboros: A Romance, London: Jonathan Cape […], →OCLC, page 27: ↩

2. c. 1611, William Shakespeare, Cymbeline, act 1, scene 7: ↩

3. 1735 January 13 (Gregorian calendar; indicated as 1734), [Alexander] Pope, An Epistle from Mr. Pope, to Dr. Arbuthnot, London: […] J[ohn] Wright for Lawton Gilliver […], →OCLC, page 6, lines 101–102: ↩

4. 1922 February, James Joyce, “[Episode 1]”, in Ulysses, Paris: Shakespeare and Company, […], →OCLC: ↩

5. 2013, John Christgau, Incident at the Otterville Station: A Civil War Story of Slavery and Rescue, U of Nebraska Press, →ISBN, page 25: ↩

6. 1887, Mrs. Dominic D. Daly, Digging, Squatting, and Pioneering Life in the Northern Territory of South Australia, page 14: ↩

7. 2018 December 1, Drachinifel, 10:12 from the start, in Anti-Slavery Patrols - The West Africa Squadron ‎${}^{[1]}$, archived from the original on 29 November 2024: ↩

Link to original

Secondary

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