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say it: SLAY-vish
slavish is an adjective meaning "blindly imitative". It is pronounced /ˈsleɪvɪʃ/ — SLAY-vish. It carries 2 recorded senses.
abjectly submissive; characteristic of a slave or servant
“slavish devotion to her job ruled her life”
“a slavish yes-man to the party bosses”
“she has become submissive and subservient”
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for slavish come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.