sicker
Certain.
Adjective dialectal, obsolete
- Certain.
- I'm sicker that he's not home.
- Secure, safe.
- To walk a sicker path
- But ſicker ſo it is, as the bꝛight ſtarre / Seemeth ay greater, when it is farre: - 1579, Immeritô [pseudonym; Edmund Spenser], “September. Ægloga Nona.”, in The Shepheardes Calender: […], London: […] Hugh Singleton,...
- And here was we made sicker than he was wi' you[…] - 1880, L.B. Walford, “Dick Netherby”, in Good Words, volume 22, Alexander Strahan and Company, page 774:
Origin
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.
Forms
Adjective comparative, form of
- comparative form of sick: more sick.
Origin
Inherited from Middle English siker, sikker, sykkere, secre, seccre, from Old English sēocra (“sicker”), equivalent to sick + -er.
Adverb
- Certainly.
- Securely.
Forms
Derived
Verb
- To percolate, trickle, or seep; to ooze, as water through a crack.
- No drop of water fell from the hot blue Or sickered from the skeleton of earth. - 1917, Gerhart Hauptmann, Ludwig Lewisohn, The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann, volume 7, page 185:
- 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. - 1926, Jakob Wassermann, Wedlock, volume 10, page 217:
- The solution steadily sickered through the debris and the sampling of the solutions could be carried out without taking the equipment into pieces. - 1943, Acta minerologica, petrographica, volumes 1-11, page 17:
Origin
Inherited 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.