Advertisement

Advertisement

View synonyms for slippery slope

slippery slope

noun

  1. a dangerous and irreversible course:

    the slippery slope from narcotics to prison.



Discover More

Word History and Origins

Origin of slippery slope1

First recorded in 1985–90
Discover More

Idioms and Phrases

A dangerous course, one that leads easily to catastrophe, as in He's on a slippery slope, compromising his values to please both the bosses and the union . This metaphoric expression alludes to traversing a slick hillside, in constant danger of falling. [Mid-1900s]
Discover More

Example Sentences

This has been pitched as greasing the skids on the slippery slope to socialism, and McCarthy presided over it.

Having survived a slippery slope on Thin Ice, protagonist Beth Rivers has been laying low in Benedict, Alaska.

From Ozy

Last week, she suggested such a bill might be a slippery slope toward excessive government regulation of business.

The NCAA and 11 of its top conferences, worried that the ruling was a slippery slope toward a true open labor market for players, appealed the case to the Supreme Court, which will make its first antitrust ruling on college sports in 37 years.

From Time

Historically, conservatives treated the minimum wage as an affront to free labor and a step on a slippery slope towards statism.

Swiss leaders also dispel the “slippery slope” idea by repeatedly rejecting substantial minimum wage increases.

The slippery slope argument is a way of keeping the hands-off-the-Internet-entirely philosophy going.

So I found that scene to be the most “slippery slope,” in terms of how do you act that?

But the other major issue for some critics is the idea that the Tennessee law creates a slippery slope.

Some fall to rise no more, but their surviving comrades rush up the slippery slope.

In the drenching rain the French pushed forward, dragging their guns with great difficulty up the slippery slope.

The more active of the attackers assisted those who experienced difficulty in negotiating the slippery slope.

Margery took hold of the rope, meanwhile gazing up the slippery slope.

Scrambling up a slippery slope, they were soon out of the water, on a narrow, shelving ledge running along a steep wall.

Advertisement

Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023

Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

Advertisement

Advertisement

Advertisement


slippery elmslippy