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This week's theme is: Scrabble-friendly swamps. sluice 
(noun, transitive verb, intransitive verb)
[sloos]
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noun
1. an artifical passage for water, fitted with a valve or gate, as in a mill stream, for stopping or regulating the flow; a floodgate
2. an opening or channel through which something flows; a source of supply: "Tom avoided discussing financial details, which could be a sluice for a series of distracting and unpleasant conversations."
3. the stream flowing through a floodgate
4. (as in mining) a long box or trough through which water flows
transitive verb
5. to emit by, or as if by, flood gates
6. to wet copiously, as by opening a sluice; 'to sluice meadows' (Howitt); 'He dried his neck and face, which he had been sluicing with cold water.' (De Quincey)
7. to wash with, or in, a stream of water running through a sluice; 'to sluice earth or gold dust in mining'
intransitive verb
8. to flow out from a sluice
Origin:
Approximately 1340; from Old French, 'escluse': sluice, floodgate; from Late Latin, 'exclusa': barrier to shut out water ('aqua exclusa': water shut out); from Latin, 'excludere': to shut out.
In action:
"I am an Edinburgh midwife, inspired to visit Lilongwe when I saw photos taken last year by colleagues at the Simpson Maternity Centre who had volunteered in Malawi. The images of dead babies, wrapped in their mothers' dresses, lying in the filthy hospital sluice convinced me I should help. I came up with the idea for a recipe book to raise funds. A year on, we have raised £70,000 for the charity Malawi Underprivileged Mothers (MUMs), with more to come. And last month I arrived at Bottom.
The contrast with my own job could hardly be starker. Simpson's is the biggest maternity unit in Scotland, with 12 midwives on any shift in the labour ward. At Bottom, three midwives a shift cope with twice as many deliveries. There is little time for holding a mum's hand -- there are just too many babies to deliver."
Linda McDonald. "Midwife driven to make Malawi mercy mission," [The grim reality of childbirth in a Lilongwe hospital has made me determined to help.] [Scotland] Sunday Times (June 4, 2006).
"Shaped like a cereal bowl cut in half, the ravine's dominant feature is a wide slope near the center called the headwall. It's flanked by about a half-dozen narrow routes with names such as Chute and Sluice.
Most who venture into the ravine strap skis or snowboards to their backpacks for the climb up. Many wear crampons and use ice axes for extra stability to cope with grades as steep as 55 degrees.
Many people who think they aren't afraid of heights learn otherwise on the climb."
Robert F. Bukaty. "Sometimes skiers go to extremes," Associated Press (June 2, 2006).
"In the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford there is a painting by Canaletto showing one of his incomparable depictions of everyday life, not in the piazzas of Venice this time, but near the town of Dolo on the Brenta canal. Sun shines down on a group of elegantly dressed ladies and gentlemen taking the air, on a man sitting on a heap of sacks of corn or flour, on another man leaning over a stone wall fishing, on a woman carrying a child, on sluice-gates and mill-wheels, on geese pecking at the ground or running along with outstretched wings, on a party in the distance embarking on a vessel tied up by the bank, on gondolas and other vessels plying to and fro, on the campanile of a church dominating the skyline."
Philip Pullman. "Dark deeds along the towpath," The Guardian (May 30, 2006).
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