Skit

How to spell skit

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce skit

What does skit mean?

1. nounA short comic or satirical performance, often parodying something familiar.

Skit in a sentence

• The office party ended with a skit poking fun at the new dress code.

• The students wrote a skit that mocked the slow cafeteria queue.

Where does skit come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

Skit appeared in English in the 1700s, first meaning a piece of mockery or a satirical jibe before settling into its modern sense of a short comic performance. Its deeper roots are genuinely uncertain, but the most widely accepted view links it to a Scandinavian source, comparing it with the Old Norse verb 'skjota', meaning 'to shoot' or 'to dart quickly', and with later dialect words like 'skite' meaning to move rapidly or to caper about. The idea is that a skit was originally a quick, darting bit of nonsense or a sudden satirical hit. From the sense of a light, mocking remark it broadened in the 1800s to mean a brief, humorous theatrical sketch. Because the word is so short and phonetically plain, its spelling rarely causes trouble; the only real ancestry note is that the same Norse 'shoot, dart' family also feeds several lively English dialect words.

How the word is built

• skit (a short comic piece; a single, unanalysable root)