Skip

How to spell skip

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce skip

What does skip mean?

1. verbTo move along with light springing steps, or to jump repeatedly over a swinging rope.
2. verbTo leave out or pass over something, such as a step, a meal, or a section of text.
3. nounA large open metal container for building rubbish and waste, delivered and collected by lorry.

Skip in a sentence

• verb

  The children like to skip across the playground at break.

• verb

  You can skip the introduction and start at chapter two.

• noun

  They hired a skip to clear the rubble from the kitchen renovation.

• verb

  She warms up by learning to skip with a rope before training.

• verb

  He decided to skip lunch to finish the report on time.

• noun

  The old floorboards went straight into the skip outside.

Where does skip come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

Skip first appears in Middle English around the 1300s as skippen, meaning to spring lightly or leap, and it is generally traced to a Scandinavian source related to Old Norse skopa 'to take a run' and similar Nordic words for darting or bounding movement. From that core idea of a light, bouncing motion came the familiar playground sense of hopping along on alternating feet and of swinging a rope underfoot. The figurative sense of leaving something out, as in passing over a page or a meal, grew naturally from the picture of jumping past a point rather than walking through it. The much later British noun for a large open waste container is a shortened form of 'skep', an old word for a basket (itself from Old Norse skeppa, a measure or basket), so that meaning travelled by a separate route even though the spelling landed on the same four letters. Because skip is short and phonetically regular, its spelling has stayed remarkably stable since the medieval period.

How the word is built

• skip (single root from Middle English skippen: to spring or leap)