Skim

How to spell skim

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce skim

What does skim mean?

1. verbTo read or look over something rapidly, taking in only the main points.
2. verbTo remove a layer of fat, cream, or foam from the surface of a liquid.
3. verbTo move swiftly and lightly across a surface, barely touching it.

Skim in a sentence

• She only had time to skim the report before the meeting.

• Skim the fat off the stock before you add the vegetables.

• The children love to skim flat stones across the pond.

• Many readers skim long emails and miss the important details.

• He likes to skim the cream from the top of the milk.

• Swallows skim low over the lake at dusk.

Where does skim come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Skim first appears in late Middle English, around the 1400s, in the sense of lifting the frothy layer off a boiling or settling liquid. It is closely tied to the older noun 'scum', which described the foam or impurities that rise to the top, and that connection runs back through Old French escume and ultimately a Germanic word for froth shared across the North Sea languages. The earliest English meaning, removing cream or scum from the surface, gradually broadened: by extension a stone or a bird could 'skim' lightly across water, just grazing the top. From there the figurative reading sense developed, where the eye glides over a page taking in only the surface. The spelling stayed mercifully simple, a short vowel between two single consonants, which is why it rarely troubles adult writers.

How the word is built

• skim (single root, of Scandinavian/Germanic origin meaning to remove scum or froth)