skinning

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle of skin.

   The hunters spent the evening skinning the deer they had brought down.

   Skinning a fresh catch quickly helps keep the meat clean.

   Note

   The -ing form covers every use of the verb skin, and the verb has more than hunters' uses. A child can be skinning a knee on gravel, a programmer can be skinning an app with a new look, and in British usage a player can be skinning a defender with tricks. Intransitively, a healing wound is skinning. As a gerund it shades into the noun for removing hides, which also has a plural, skinnings.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   The act of removing the skin, as from animals killed for their meat, hides, or fur.

   The skinning of the deer was done carefully to keep the hide intact.

   He learned the proper skinning of trapped beavers from his grandfather.

   Similarflaying

   Note

   Butchery and the fur trade are the everyday home of this noun, but it can also name violence done to people. David T. Pudlevitcz's Blood of the Dragon (2003) lists "decapitations and skinnings, impalings and crucifixions", where the plural counts separate acts. In ordinary use it usually takes of: the skinning of the deer.

3. 3
   adjectivecolloquialIreland

   Exceptionally cold, as of harsh winter weather.

   A skinning wind cut across the open field as they walked home.

   By dawn the air had turned skinning cold, freezing every puddle solid.

   Similarbiting, bitter, freezing, piercing, icy

   Oppositebalmy, warm, mild

   Note

   Irish colloquial speech has its own word for the bitterest weather, and the image is of cold sharp enough to take the skin off you. It works before a noun (a skinning wind) and as an intensifier fused to cold itself (skinning cold). Keep it to weather and to casual talk. It belongs to conversation, not to a forecast.

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