Interestingly enough, that means it entered English earlier than “slew.” Obviously the English word no longer refers to a literal battle cry, but has the meaning of a phrase representing a group or movement. As we saw above, one meaning of sluagh is “army,” and ghairm means “cry.” This term was first used in English in the 1510s, in the form slogorne. sluagh-ghairm is a Gaelic term (either Irish or Scottish Gaelic) meaning “battle cry,” referring to battle cries used by Scottish and Irish clans. The word slogan also stems partly from the same word. Slew comes from Irish sluagh “an army, crowd, multitude.” It entered English in the mid-1800s.
The man committed a slew of armed robberies. One example is the word “slew” meaning “a large number”. Lots of of these words entered English from the Goidelic (or Gaelic) languages: Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Manx, all of which developed from Old Irish. There is a significant number of such Celtic words that have entered English over the centuries since that early period of contact. In the comments on that video, many people pointed out additional Celtic words in English that I didn’t mention.
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