slicing

Concise Oxford English Dictionary © 2008 Oxford University Press:
slice/slʌɪs/

▶noun

• 1 a thin, broad piece of food cut from a larger portion.

  ■ a portion or share.

• 2 a utensil with a broad, flat blade for lifting foods such as cake and fish.

• 3 (in sports) a sliced stroke or shot.

▶verb

• 1 cut into slices.

  ■ (often slice something off/from) cut with or as if with a sharp implement.

• 2 move easily and quickly.

• 3 Golf strike (the ball) so that it curves away to the right (for a left-handed player, the left).

  ■ (in other sports) propel (the ball) with a glancing contact so that it travels forward spinning.

– phrases
slice and dice divide a quantity of information up into smaller parts, especially in order to analyse it more closely or in different ways.

– derivatives
sliceable adjective,
slicer noun.

– origin ME (in the sense ‘fragment, splinter’): shortening of OFr. esclice ‘splinter’, from the verb esclicier, of Gmc origin; rel. to slit.