Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Sure; certain; assured; secure; firm; safe.
  • Certainly; indeed; surely; firmly; securely; confidently; safely.
  • To secure; assure; make certain or safe; plight; betroth.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • intransitive verb (Mining), Prov. Eng. To percolate, trickle, or ooze, as water through a crack.
  • adjective Obs. or Prov. Eng. & Scot. Sure; certain; trusty.
  • adverb obsolete Surely; certainly.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective comparative form of sick: more sick
  • adjective certain
  • adjective secure
  • adverb certainly
  • adverb securely
  • verb mining, UK, dialect To percolate, trickle, or ooze, as water through a crack.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

sick +‎ -er

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Middle English siker ("secure, safe, stable, certain; gewiss, securely, safely, certainly"), from Old English sicer, sicor ("secure from, free from guilt and the punishment, safe, free from danger or harm, sure, certain, free from doubt, trustworthy"), from Proto-Germanic *sikuraz (“free, secure”), from Latin sēcūrus ("secure", literally "without care"). See secure. Cognate with Scots siker, seker ("safe, secure"), North Frisian sijcker ("sure, secure"), Dutch zeker ("sure, certain, safe, secure, confirmed"), German sicher ("sure, secure, confirmed"), Swedish säker ("secure, safe, sure"), Norwegian sikker ("secure").

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Examples

  • IWhat makes me sicker is that people actually want her to be our next President.

    Poll: Rising number of voters find campaign too negative, dull 2008

  • Triebel (more known in Germany for her stage work) and Vogel are both so natural and empathetic together that the love story at the heart of this, especially as he grows sicker, is hard to shake off.

    GreenCine Daily: SFIFF Dispatch. 6. 2007

  • What makes these insane priorities the sicker is that this obscene amount of money is spent in the name of defending either freedom or socialism ... no doubt the dead and dying are relieved that freedom and socialism are being so efficiently defended!

    Betty Williams - Nobel Lecture 1976

  • To complicate matters, you cannot treat for TB and give ARV med’s at the same time, so all of these patients are steadily getting sicker from the AIDS while they are recovering from the TB.

    giving thanks jen 2005

  • To complicate matters, you cannot treat for TB and give ARV med’s at the same time, so all of these patients are steadily getting sicker from the AIDS while they are recovering from the TB.

    Archive 2005-11-01 jen 2005

  • Now a study done at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center shows that the sicker are also the less-educated.

    Archive 2006-09-01 Steve Carper 2006

  • Now a study done at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center shows that the sicker are also the less-educated.

    Food Labels Not Understood by the Sick Steve Carper 2006

  • It's that the hospital patients are what's called 'sicker and quicker' - they need more attention.

    KansasCity.com: Front Page 2011

  • This opens them up to antiselection -- in other words sicker people who need the higher cover migrate to the scheme.

    Mail & Guardian Online 2009

  • So why not let Internists concentrate on the "sicker" patients they supposedly excel at caring for -- in the hospital.

    Archive 2008-01-01 1 Dinosaur 2008

Comments

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  • Besides being a comparative, apparently this is an archaic/dialect way of saying 'certainly' or 'safe'/'make safe' and, says Webster's, a mining term (though the OED just marks it 'rare') meaning 'To percolate, trickle, or ooze, as water through a crack. sigger, zigger, and zifhyr.'>Also written sigger, zigger, and zifhyr.'

    August 10, 2008

  • In the "certainly" sense, it's a relative of German sicher and, distantly, sure and secure. It was resurrected in the Early Modern English period (outside of dialectal usage) as part of the reaction against inkhorn terms.

    November 14, 2008