Ski

How to spell ski

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce ski

What does ski mean?

1. nounOne of a pair of long narrow runners attached to boots for gliding over snow.
2. verbTo travel or glide over snow on a pair of skis.

Ski in a sentence

• noun

  A broken binding made the left ski unusable on the slope.

• verb

  They plan to ski in the Alps every February.

• noun

  He waxed each ski carefully before the morning run.

• verb

  Learning to ski took her several lessons and a few falls.

Where does ski come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

This word came into English from Norwegian ski, which descends from the Old Norse word skíð, meaning a split billet or length of wood, a strip cleaved from a log. The same Old Norse root is a cousin of the native English word 'shide', an old term for a splinter or thin board, and it is also related to the verb 'shed' in the sense of dividing or parting. English adopted the modern winter-sport sense in the middle of the 1800s as Scandinavian snow travel became known to a wider public. A quirk of the borrowing is its spelling: in Norwegian the 'sk' before 'i' is pronounced like an English 'sh', so the word was originally said closer to 'shee', and some early English speakers tried that before settling on the now-standard hard 'skee'. The compact three-letter spelling, with no doubled letters and a final 'i' rather than 'ee', is itself the small trap, since it looks unfinished to English eyes.

How the word is built

• ski (a borrowing of Norwegian ski, from Old Norse skíð: a split length of wood); no internal prefix or suffix