Skirt

How to spell skirt

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce skirt

What does skirt mean?

1. nounA piece of clothing worn from the waist down, hanging loosely over the legs.
2. verbTo pass along the edge of something, or to avoid a difficult subject or obstacle.

Skirt in a sentence

• noun

  She ironed the pleated skirt before the interview.

• verb

  The new road will skirt the edge of the old village.

• noun

  The tailor shortened the skirt by two inches.

• verb

  The manager tried to skirt the question about layoffs.

Where does skirt come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

Skirt came into English in the early 1300s from the Old Norse word skyrta, which meant a shirt or a short garment. Norse settlers brought the word during the Viking presence in England, and it sat side by side with the native English shirt, which descends from the very same Germanic root meaning something short or cut short. Over time English split the two: shirt kept the upper-body meaning, while skirt drifted to describe the lower, hanging part of a garment and then a garment of its own. The verb sense, meaning to pass along the edge of something or to avoid it, grew naturally from the idea of the skirt as the outer border or hem of a thing. The hard initial sk- spelling is itself a Norse fingerprint, since words that came through Old English often softened that sound to sh-, which is why skirt and shirt look like twins.

How the word is built

• skirt (from Old Norse skyrta: shirt, garment)