sicker

English edit

Pronunciation edit

(General American) IPA^(key): /ˈsɪkɚ/
Rhymes: -ɪkə(ɹ)
Audio (US) (file)

Etymology 1 edit

From Middle English siker, sikker, sykkere, secre, seccre, from Old English sēocra (“sicker”), equivalent to sick +‎ -er.

Adjective edit

sicker

comparative form of sick: more sick.

Etymology 2 edit

From Middle English siker, from Old English sicer, sicor, from Proto-West Germanic *sikur (“free, secure”), from Latin sēcūrus (“secure”, literally “without care”). Doublet of sure and secure.

Alternative forms edit

siker, siccer, siccar

Adjective edit

sicker

(obsolete outside dialects) Certain.
I'm sicker that he's not home.
(obsolete outside dialects) Secure, safe.
To walk a sicker path
- 1579, Immeritô [pseudonym; Edmund Spenser], “September. Aegloga Nona.”, in The Shepheardes Calender: […], London: […] Hugh Singleton, […], →OCLC; reprinted as H[einrich] Oskar Sommer, editor, The Shepheardes Calender […], London: John C. Nimmo, […], 1890, →OCLC, folio 36, recto:
  But ſicker ſo it is, as the bꝛight ſtarre / Seemeth ay greater, when it is farre:
- 1880, L.B. Walford, “Dick Netherby”, in Good Words‎^[1], volume 22, Alexander Strahan and Company, page 774:
  And here was we made sicker than he was wi' you […]
- 1896, Samuel Rutherford Crockett, chapter XVII, in The Raiders: Being Some Passages in the Life of John Faa, Lord and Earl of Little Egypt‎^[2], Macmillan and Company, page 125:
  I'm as great on the side o' the law as it's siccar to be in thae uncertain times.

Adverb edit

sicker

(obsolete outside dialects) Certainly.
(obsolete outside dialects) Securely.

Derived terms edit

Etymology 3 edit

From Middle English *sikeren (attested only as sikeriez (“(it) trickles, (it) leaks, (it) oozes”)), from Old English sicerian (“to ooze, seep”), from Proto-West Germanic *sikarōn, from Proto-Germanic *sikarōną (“to trickle”), from Proto-Germanic *sīką (“slow running water”). Cognate with German Low German sickern (“to seep”), German sickern (“to seep, trickle”). Akin also to English sitch.

Alternative forms edit

sigger, zigger

Verb edit

sicker (third-person singular simple present sickers, present participle sickering, simple past and past participle sickered)

(intransitive, literal, figurative) To percolate, trickle, or seep; to ooze, as water through a crack.
- 1917, Gerhart Hauptmann, Ludwig Lewisohn, The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann, volume 7, page 185:
  No drop of water fell from the hot blue
  Or sickered from the skeleton of earth.
- 1926, Jakob Wassermann, Wedlock, volume 10, page 217:
  This cause had sickered into his soul; it had been branded upon his forehead somehow, by some hand; he knew not how nor by whom.
- 1943, Acta minerologica, petrographica, volumes 1-11, page 17:
  The solution steadily sickered through the debris and the sampling of the solutions could be carried out without taking the equipment into pieces.

Part or all of this entry has been imported from the 1913 edition of Webster’s Dictionary, which is now free of copyright and hence in the public domain. The imported definitions may be significantly out of date, and any more recent senses may be completely missing.
(See the entry for “sicker”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.)