sliced

Sliced is the past participle of the verb slice and is used as an adjective or in noun phrases to describe items that have been cut into flat, thin pieces or sections. It implies that the object has been prepared by cutting along a plane to produce pieces with relatively even thickness.

In cooking and food preparation, sliced describes foods cut into uniform pieces: sliced bread, sliced cheese, sliced deli meats, and sliced fruits or vegetables. Thickness can vary by purpose, from very thin for garnish to thicker for salads or sandwiches. The term gained widespread usage with the advent of mass-produced pre-sliced loaves in the late 1920s, made possible by bread-slicing machines designed by Otto Rohwedder; pre-sliced bread became common in supermarkets in the 1930s. The phrase the best thing since sliced bread entered popular idiom during that era.

Beyond food, sliced applies to any object cut into slices, such as a sliced tomato, a cross-section of a rock, or a data slice in statistics and computing. In geometry, a slice refers to a cross-section obtained by intersecting a solid with a plane; objects described as sliced have been cut to reveal internal features. The term thus encompasses both everyday culinary uses and more technical contexts where a division into parallel, flat pieces is relevant.