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"They were the footprints of a gigantic hound!" Those canine tracks in Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles set the great Sherlock Holmes sleuthing on the trail of a murderer. It was a case of art imitating etymology. When Middle English speakers first borrowed sleuth from the Old Norse word slōth, the term referred to the track of an animal or person. In Scotland, sleuth hund referred to a kind of bloodhound used to hunt game or track down fugitives from justice. In 19th-century U.S. English, sleuthhound, soon shortened to sleuth, began to be used for a detective. From there, sleuth slipped into verb use to apply to what a sleuth does.
Examples of sleuth in a Sentence
Brian Welk, IndieWire, 18 Sep. 2025
Social media sleuths have gathered clues that allegedly tie D4vd, legal name David Anthony Burke, to the victim.
—Demicia Inman, VIBE.com, 18 Sep. 2025
Julia Harrison, Architectural Digest, 16 Sep. 2025
For the next two decades, the unlikely duo secretly sleuthed together on an array of front-page crimes happening in real time — missing Yale student Annie Le; newlywed George Smith murdered on a cruise ship; missing 5-year-old Noah Thomas, who disappeared in a rural town in Appalachian Virginia.
—Natasha Stoynoff, PEOPLE, 7 Sep. 2025
See All Example Sentences for sleuth
Cite this Entry
“Sleuth.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sleuth. Accessed 20 Sep. 2025.
Copy CitationKids Definition
sleuth
1 of 2 nounsleuth
2 of 2 verbNoun
a shortened form of sleuthhound "a dog that follows a track or trail by scent," from Middle English sleuth "a track or trail"; of Norse origin
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