My inclination on seeing the word would be to pronounce it “sluff” and the meaning to discard a card that isn’t the suit led and not a trump.
However, if I saw it capitalized, as a name, then I would think of it as “slew” and some kind of water thing. Maybe a pond. Unless I was reading Pilgrim’s Progress and the name was Slough of Despond, in which case I would pronounce it “slaw” and think of it as a really murky pond, or a stock tank, but with a low water level and lots of mud.
Er…California, Texas, Colorado, Oklahoma. I’m thinking I did not see this in Texas.
To walk with difficulty through snow, swampland or similar terrain; figuratively, to perform a tiresome job (“slough through a pile of paperwork”). No idea where the heck I got it from.
Without reading thread: it means for a surface layer to fall or peel off. “The monster’s skin sloughed off”, “the topsoil of the hill sloughed off”. I just picked it up reading it in various books of fiction.
Slough: (rhymes with plough) - a muddy, marshy area that is hard to escape from - as in the slough of despond in The Pilgrims Progress. Also the name of a city in the UK, with exactly the same connotations of depression and inescapability.
I’ve never heard it pronounced “slew”. If it were pronounced to rhyme with “tough”, I would define it as throwing or casting off something, and if it rhymed with “plough”, I would think of the town that’s a stop on the rail line from Paddington to Reading.
As a noun pronounced “slew”, it’s a creek or small waterway in a marshy, delta area. I learned that in the Sacramento delta of California. My favorite one is still Whiskey Slough, where my uncle would take us fishing for catfish when we were little. I remember when I first saw the word on a map and realized “Oh, that’s how you spell it!”