A-Z Database
A skeleton key is so-called because its shape was filed down to its basic, essential parts, resembling a skeletal structure, designed to bypass the in...
British colloquialism for askew or out of kilter and dates from the mid-19th century. The first part of the word is clearly from askew meaning awry o...
Skid row is an American expression that can mean either destitute or impoverished or it can mean a specific impoverished district of a town or city, r...
This proverb has many forms e.g. 'there are many different ways to skin a cat', meaning that there is more one way of doing things, or there is more t...
Rhyming slang for sister, skin and blister/sister, dates from the late 19th/early 20th century.
see By the skin of one’s teeth
A miserly, avaricious person dates from c. 1700 and derives from an earlier and now largely obsolete expression, to skin a flint, which meant miserly...
Skinny meaning thin or emaciated dates from the 1600s. Skinny meaning inside information or the real truth, is American and dates from the late 1950s,...
To skinny dip is to swim naked and the expression is first attested from the 1950s. The origin is American from the allusion of stripping down to one’...
British slang from the early 20th century for broke or penniless. It derives from being ‘skinned’ which is also slang and means the same thing but dat...
Originally, a skipper was a captain of a ship, the word being an anglicisation of the Middle Dutch schipper where schip means ship. The word in Englis...
To skive or skive off is British informal to shirk work or malinger and dates from the early 20th century. The origin is unknown although there are so...
Disparaging colloquialism for a lowly female domestic maid or worker dates from the early 20th century, according to the OED it is possibly from slavv...
South African slang for a disreputable person dates from the late 19th/early 20th century from the Afrikaans skuit meaning excrement. See also cheapsk...
This word remains an etymological mystery. It describes dishonest, underhand or wicked behaviour and first appears in this sense in America during the...