Skyscraper

How to spell skyscraper

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce skyscraper

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does skyscraper mean?

1. nounA very tall multistorey building, typically found in a city centre.

Skyscraper in a sentence

• The new skyscraper dominates the city skyline.

• Glass panels on the skyscraper reflected the afternoon sun.

Where does skyscraper come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

This is a transparent English compound formed from 'sky' and 'scraper', and its charm is how literal it is: a building so tall it seems to scrape the sky. The first element, 'sky', came into English from Old Norse 'sky', which originally meant 'cloud' rather than the open heavens, while 'scrape' descends from the Old Norse 'skrapa' and Old English 'scrapian', meaning to rub or graze a surface. Long before it meant a tall building, 'skyscraper' had a busy career as a vivid nautical term in the 1700s for a tall triangular sail set at the very top of a mast, and it was also applied to tall horses, tall hats, tall people, and even a high-flying ball in early baseball. The modern architectural sense arose in the United States in the 1880s, when steel-frame construction in Chicago and New York finally let buildings climb to genuinely sky-grazing heights. Because every part of the word is a familiar everyday element, the spelling holds few surprises beyond remembering the single 'c' in 'scraper'.

How the word is built

• sky (Old Norse 'sky/cloud')
• scrape (to graze a surface)
• -er (agent suffix: thing that does)