In the casting components of superalloys with increasing content of the refractory elements the occurrence of sliver defects becomes rather frequent. In comparison to the other grain defects such as stray grains and freckles, the sliver defect was less well understood and its formation mechanism is still unclear. In the present work, the origins of the sliver defects in the single crystal (SC) castings were investigated. In the metallographic detection, sliver grains can be identified to be miss-alignments of isolated, individual primary dendrite on the SC matrix. The sliver defects originated from the tearing of the existing dendrite stems in the mush zone, revealing a clear starting point of sliver defect. The cracks of the dendrites were filled by the interdendritic residual melt, which finally solidified into γ′-stripes. The tearing of some existing dendrite stems can be attributed to the adhesion of shell mold that hinders the shrinkage of the columnar dendrites on the casting surface. The second reason for the dendrite tearing is the insertion of oxide residues which significantly weakens the strength of the dendrite stems. Due to the support of the neighboring columnar dendrites, the tilting of the broken dendrites is limited, so that the grain boundary between a sliver and the matrix structure has normally a low angle. The structure and formation mechanisms of sliver defects were discussed in comparison with other defects such as stray grains, freckles and low angle grain boundaries. The corresponding methods were proposed to avoid sliver defects in production of SC superalloy castings.