slunk

• IPA^(key): /slʌŋk/

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• Rhymes: -ʌŋk

From an allusive sense of slink (“to bring forth young prematurely”).

slunk (plural slunks)

1. An animal, especially a calf, born prematurely or abortively.
   • 1962 [1959], William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch, New York: Grove Press:

     Then I met a great guy, Placenta Juan the Afterbirth Tycoon. Made his in slunks during the war. (Slunks are underage calves trailing afterbirths and bacteria, generally in an unsanitary and unfit condition.)

   • 2001, ed. Rob Cook, The Making of a Drum Company, Hal Leonard, published 2001, page 53:

     Calf heads were tanned from yearling calves less than a year in age. Slunk skins were tanned from unborn calfskins which, gruesome as it sounds, were often by products of the cow slaughtering process.

Compare slank (“low place, especially one which fills with water”), dialectal slonk (“depression, hollow, slough”).

slunk (plural slunks)

1. (UK, dialectal) A slough, a low, wet, miry place. (Compare slank.)
   • 1827, William Tennant, Papistry Storm'd: Or, The Dingin' Down O' the Cathedral : Ane Poem, in Sax Sangs, page 88:

     Amang the harbour's sludge and mud; They row'd thegither in the slunk; Their heads were up, their bodies sunk; What wi' the slusch they ate and drunk,  […]

   • 1907, Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons, Sessional Papers, page 202:

     He made the road, and since it was made there was never anything done to it except when men were carting turf and then they would fill in a "slunk." You might say now it is no road.

     }
   • (Can we date this quote?), Gordon Kendal, Gavin Douglas's Translation of 'The Aeneid' (1513), page 580:

     a 'slunk' is a 'slonk' (depression) with mud;

slunk

1. simple past and past participle of slink

• lunks