Skins

How to spell skins

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce skins

What does skins mean?

1. nounThe outer protective layers covering bodies, or thin outer coverings of fruit and other objects.
2. verbStrips the outer covering from something, or grazes the surface of one's body.

Skins in a sentence

• noun

  The recipe asks you to remove the potato skins before mashing.

• verb

  The cook carefully skins the fish fillets before frying them.

• noun

  Sensitive skins can react badly to harsh soaps.

• verb

  He always skins his knee when he falls off the bike.

Where does skins come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

This is the plural and third-person form of 'skin', a word English took from the Old Norse 'skinn', which meant an animal hide or pelt. Scandinavian settlers brought it to England during the Viking age, and it gradually pushed aside the native Old English words 'hyd' (the ancestor of 'hide') and 'fell' for the body's outer covering. The original sense was strictly the stripped hide of a beast, but over the medieval period it broadened to mean the living covering of a person or creature, and later still the thin outer layer of fruit, liquids, and other surfaces. The same Norse root left relatives across the Scandinavian languages, and the simple spelling has stayed remarkably stable; the only trap is the plain plural -s rather than anything fancier.

How the word is built

• skin (Old Norse skinn: hide, pelt)
• -s (plural noun / third-person verb suffix)