sloppy

From slop +‎ -y.

• (UK) IPA^(key): /ˈslɒp.i/

  • Audio (Southern England):

    (file)

• (US) IPA^(key): /ˈslɑ.pi/
• Rhymes: -ɒpi

sloppy (comparative sloppier, superlative sloppiest)

1. Very wet; covered in or composed of slop.

   The dog tracked sloppy mud through the kitchen!

2. Messy; not neat, elegant, or careful.

   The carpenter did a sloppy job of building the staircase.

   • 2024 February 23, Paul MacInnes, “‘Some of the sloppiest writing I’ve ever watched’: how True Detective’s creator turned on his own show”, in The Guardian‎^[1]:

     Among the key criticisms: the writing in the finale was “some of the sloppiest … I’ve ever watched”, while the show in general was a “hot mess of faux character archs [sic]” which made “repeated heavy-handed attempts” to show that “Man=Problem”. (Now that’s a tattoo-worthy phrase if ever there was one).

   • 2025 January 8, Arwa Mahdawi, “AI-generated ‘slop’ is slowly killing the internet, so why is nobody trying to stop it?”, in The Guardian‎^[2]:

     The likes of Liv may be gone from Meta for now, but our online future seems to be getting sloppier and sloppier.

3. Imprecise or loose.

   a sloppy measurement; a sloppy fit

   • 1985, Anthony Burgess, Kingdom of the Wicked:

     My Greek is not the tongue of Homer or Aeschylus but a sloppy ungrammatical sabir lacking Attic salt and tending to a saccharinity which sets my teeth on edge.

• See also Thesaurus:careless

• “sloppy”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.
• William Dwight Whitney, Benjamin E[li] Smith, editors (1911), “sloppy”, in The Century Dictionary […], New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., →OCLC.

• polyps