slough

The skin shed by a snake or other reptile.

That is the slough of a rattler; we must be careful.

And without more ado she stood up and shook the white wrappings from her, and came forth shining and splendid like some glittering snake when she has cast her slough; ay, and fixed her wonderful eyes upon me - more deadly than any Basilisk's - and pierced me through and through with their beauty, and sent her light laugh ringing through the air like chimes of silver bells.

Dead skin on a sore or ulcer.

This is the slough that came off of his skin after the burn.

To shed skin or outer layers.

This skin is being sloughed.

Snakes slough their skin periodically.

To slide off or flake off, as an outer layer, such as skin, might do.

A week after he was burned, a layer of skin on his arm sloughed off.

The mud sloughed off her palms easily […]

To discard.

East sloughed a heart.

To commit truancy, be absent from school without permission.

A marshy or muddy area.

"That comed - as you call it - of being arrant asses," retorted the doctor, "and not having sense enough to know honest air from poison, and the dry land from a vile, pestiferous slough.

Notwithstanding this discrepancy, however, and though, taught by experience, I hastened to agree with her that the secret of her birth was not likely to be discovered in a moment, nor by so simple a process as the journey to Norwich, which I had been going to suggest, it was natural that we should often revert to the subject, and to her pretensions, and the hardship of her lot: and my curiosity and questions giving a fillip to her memory, scarcely a day passed but she recovered some new detail from the past; as at one time a service of gold-plate which she perfectly remembered she had seen on her father's sideboard; and at another time an accident that had befell her in her childhood, through her father's coach and six horses being overturned in a slough.

A type of swamp or shallow lake system, typically formed as or by the backwater of a larger waterway, similar to a bayou with trees.

We paddled under a canopy of trees through the slough.

At that time I had no staff officer who could be trusted with that duty. In the woods, at a short distance below the clearing, I found a depression, dry at the time, but which at high water became a slough or bayou.

A secondary channel of a river delta, usually flushed by the tide.

The Sacramento River Delta contains dozens of sloughs that are often used for water-skiing and fishing.

A state of depression.

John is in a slough.

A small pond, often alkaline, many but not all formed by glacial potholes.

Potholes or sloughs formed by a glacier’s retreat from the central plains of North America, are now known to be some of the world’s most productive ecosystems.