Skinned

How to spell skinned

7 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce skinned

What does skinned mean?

1. verbStripped the skin from something, or grazed the skin of part of the body (past tense of skin).
2. adjectiveHaving skin of a specified kind, usually as part of a compound such as thick-skinned or dark-skinned.

Skinned in a sentence

• verb

  The hunter skinned the rabbit before cooking it over the fire.

• adjective

  The butcher hung a skinned rabbit in the shop window.

• verb

  She skinned her knee badly when she fell off the bike.

• adjective

  The chef rinsed the skinned chicken breasts before cooking them.

Where does skinned come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

The base word 'skin' came into English from the Old Norse 'skinn', which meant the hide or pelt of an animal, brought over by Norse settlers during the Viking age. It gradually displaced the native Old English word 'hyd' (the ancestor of modern 'hide') for the living covering of a body, while 'hide' kept the sense of a removed animal pelt. The verb 'to skin', meaning to strip the skin from something, developed naturally from the noun, and 'skinned' is simply its past tense. The doubled 'n' in the written form follows the regular English rule for a short stressed vowel: a single final consonant after a single vowel doubles before '-ed', which is the only real spelling trap here. The same root survives in related Scandinavian words and in compounds like 'thick-skinned' and 'bare-skinned'.

How the word is built

• skin (outer covering)
• -n- (doubled consonant)
• -ed (past tense suffix)