Skinny

How to spell skinny

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce skinny

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does skinny mean?

1. adjectiveHaving very little flesh on the body; extremely thin.
2. nounThe essential facts or confidential details about a situation (informal, used as 'the skinny').

Skinny in a sentence

• adjective

  The tailor had to take in the waist because the trousers were too skinny for him.

• noun

  She gave me the skinny on what really happened at the meeting.

• adjective

  After months of illness he looked alarmingly skinny and pale.

• noun

  Reporters wanted the skinny on the company's sudden merger.

Where does skinny come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

Skinny is built straightforwardly from the native English noun skin, which came into Old English as scinn from the Old Norse skinn, meaning the hide or pelt of an animal. The adjective form first appeared in the late 1500s with the literal sense of 'resembling skin' or 'pertaining to skin', before settling by the 1600s into the familiar meaning of someone so thin that the skin seems to cling to the bones. The Old Norse origin explains why the word feels blunt and everyday rather than learned. In twentieth-century American slang it also became a noun, 'the skinny', meaning the inside truth or essential details, perhaps from the idea of stripping a matter down to its bare skin. The spelling trap is simply the doubled n: the single-n skin gains a second n before the -y, just as funny and runny do.

How the word is built

• skin (outer covering of the body)
• -ny (adjective suffix, doubled n)