G. Brock

@Kevin I too stumbled on "sleeken" (which my autocorrect also just now stumbled on, trying to "correct" it to "sleeker"), and yet it's one of those words whose meaning, even if we've never heard it used, is immediately clear. It made me curious to see if it had ever actually been used in literature, and I found only a single example (a hapax?), from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "A Portrait": "And all voices that address her Soften, sleeken every word As if speaking to a bird." But it's a lovely example, and I expect most readers of that poem found that it felt natural and apt there, in part no doubt because it's paired with "soften," a very common word that uses the same suffix in the same way.