sluice

noun

1. An artificial passage for water, fitted with a valve or gate, for example in a canal lock or a mill stream, for stopping or regulating the flow.
2. A water gate or floodgate.
3. Hence, an opening or channel through which anything flows; a source of supply.

   “At leaſt, I'm ſure I can fiſh it out of her. She's the very Sluce to her Lady's Secrets;—'Tis but ſetting her Mill agoing, and I can drein her of 'em all.”

   “Each sluice of affluent fortune open'd soon.”

   “This home familiarity […] opens the sluices of sensibility.”

4. The stream flowing through a floodgate.
5. A long box or trough through which water flows, used for washing auriferous earth.
6. An instance of wh-stranding ellipsis, or sluicing.

verb

1. (rare, transitive)To emit by, or as by, flood gates.

   “Nigh on the plain, in many cells prepared, / That underneath had veins of liquid fire / Sluiced from the lake, a second multitude / With wondrous art founded the massy ore, / Severing each kind, and scummed the bullion-dross.”

2. (transitive)To wet copiously, as by opening a sluice

   “Nine - mile Creek has been dug out again and again , and has been sluiced three times”

   “[…] he dried his neck and face, which he had been sluicing with cold water.”

   “Millroy often described his kidneys—how he flushed them out. His lungs—the way he hyperventilated them. His heart—how he got it pumping, sluicing its gates and chambers.”

   “Many years later, in 1953, Shostakovich summarized his dissatisfactions with the competition more bluntly: "Rimsky-Korsakov groomed, waved, and sluiced Musorgsky with eau de cologne. My orchestration is crude, in keeping with Musorgsky."”

3. (transitive)To wash with, or in, a stream of water running through a sluice.

   “to sluice earth or gold dust in a sluice box in placer mining”

4. (broadly, transitive)To wash (down or out).

   “[…] he did plot the Duke of Gloucester's death, / Suggest his soon-believing adversaries, / And consequently, like a traitor coward, / Sluiced out his innocent soul through streams of blood”

   “And now men with a hose have come and are sluicing out the streets.”

   “He also organized a bucket brigade for sluicing down the decks.”

5. (intransitive)To flow, pour.

   “In the trough behind the white wave / Helen shook her dark head, the water sluiced from her shoulders / And rose-tipped breasts.”

   “Out of sight of the houses he took off his clothes and let the rain sluice down on his bare body.”

   “these are often my thoughts as my partner or my vis-a-vis spoons a berry into her mouth and I imagine it—see and hear it being chewed, the red juice running from its bursting pulp over her tongue, mingling with her saliva, slipping through the crevices between her teeth before sluicing down her throat and into her bloodstream.”

   “The huge things which had already careered into flight, they were enormous slothful sacks of billowing skin, and where the light sluiced over their bodies, they glimmered acid-blue and bronze.”

6. To elide the complement in a coordinated wh-question. See sluicing.