Word Confusion: Sleigh vs Sleight vs Slight

Plural for the noun: sleighs
Gerund: sleighing

Third person present verb: sleighs
Past tense or past participle: sleighed
Present participle: sleighing

Plural: sleights

Plural for the noun: slights
Gerund: slighting

Third person present verb: slights
Past tense or past participle: slighted
Present participle: slighting

Another name for sledge

Verb, intransitive:
[Usually functions as a gerund] To drive, travel, or ride by sleigh

Skill

• Dexterity

An artifice

• Stratagem

Cunning

• Craft

• Inconsiderable
• [Especially of a creative work] Not profound or substantial
• Somewhat trivial or superficial

[Of a person or their build] Not sturdy and strongly built

Noun:
An insult caused by a failure to show someone proper respect or attention

Verb, transitive:
Insult (someone) by treating or speaking of them without proper respect or attention

[Archaic] Raze or destroy a fortification

A tiny gentleman bows to a lady, and children pull each other in sleighs.

It’s all very depressing especially seeing as we invested in some sleighs a few years back.

We have been collecting in Swindon for about 50 years, and that sleigh had been built in 1969.

Verb, intransitive:
Snowmobiles, dog sleds and reindeer sleighs become common in the winter months. The city is a popular ski resort and winter is quite a lively time.

During these months, its countless lakes freeze solid, providing perfect surfaces for skidoo driving, reindeer sleighing, and Siberian husky safaris.

Raymond the reindeer will be lapping up the attention in Bourton again this Christmas despite fears that he would be sleighing away.

It was unequalled skiing, skating, and sleighing in the countryside.

It was a nifty bit of sleight of hand that got the ashtray into the correct position.

This is financial sleight of hand of the worst sort.

What we’re faced with are psychic sharps, like card sharps: sleight of hand, sleight of mind.

It is also deftly staged using an impressive sleight of hand and sleight of eye.

It was supposed to be a slight ankle injury.

The chance of success is very slight.

It was a slight plot with no real strength.

She was slight and delicate-looking.

Noun:
Be ware of an unintended slight that can create grudges.

He was seething at the slight to his authority.

The details of supposed slights and implied insults are trivia.

Verb, transitive:
Joey’s management company, afraid that the film was slighting their dead client for Johnny, demanded that the film-makers find more interview footage of Joey before okaying the final cut.

It seems Mr Wyatt thought the injured person slighted him in some way, but this offense is totally out of character.

They can be excessive in their devotions to Carlyle and Henry James, and their denunciations can at times be annoying in slighting great writers such as Thackeray and Jane Austen.

A Council determined whether the Fort should be kept or slighted.

In recognition of the part that castles had played in the war, the majority of surviving buildings were deliberately slighted by the victorious parliamentarians.

It was strongly slighted and used as a quarry for the town houses.

1. 1703, originally as a North American usage, from the Dutch slee shortened from slede meaning sledge.
2. 1728, as a verb.

   1770 is the first recording of sleigh-ride.

   1780 is the first recording of sleigh-bell, which was originally used to give warning of the approach of a sleigh.

1. The adjective from the Old Norse sléttr meaning smooth (an early sense in English), is of Germanic origin and related to the Dutch slechts meaning merely and the German schlicht meaning simple, schlecht meaning bad.
2. The verb, originally in the sense make smooth or level, from the Old Norse slétta. The sense treat with disrespect dates from the late 16th century.