skirt
Pluralskirts
Pluralskirts
Formsskirts, skirting, skirted
- 1A garment that hangs from the waist over the hips and partway down the legs, worn mostly by women and girls as a separate piece.
A denim skirt and sandals made up her summer outfit.
She hemmed the skirt so it fell just above the knee.
Note
The garment the other senses hang from. English took it from Old Norse skyrta, and it is a doublet of shirt: one Germanic word reaching English by two roads, so that skirt and shirt are cousins. Elsewhere the word wandered between garments. Dutch schort and German Schürze mean "apron," Danish skørt and Norwegian skjørt mean "skirt," and Swedish skört means the hem of a jacket.
- 2To move around or along the border of something, keeping away from its center.
The new bypass skirts the village to ease traffic through it.
Hikers skirt the marsh to keep their boots dry.
Similarbypass, circumvent, circle, avoid
Note
Here someone or something is moving, and the edge is what they keep to. This is the language of routes: a 1950 railway journey skirts the shores of the Dornoch Firth, and Roger Grigsby's 1994 cycling guide has riders skirt Tsengwen Reservoir. The verb takes the place as a direct object, as in "skirt a mountain." Virginia Woolf's gulls skirt the incoming waves, showing it suits flight as well as roads.
- 3To avoid or ignore something, especially a difficult matter, and manage to get past it without facing it directly.
The report skirts the real causes of the failure.
Executives skirt blame by pointing to market conditions.
Similaravoid, evade, sidestep, dodge, circumvent
Oppositeaddress, confront, tackle, face
Note
The figurative journey around an obstacle, grown from moving along an edge: you go around the problem instead of through it. Its favorite objects are issues and rules. To skirt an issue is to dodge discussing it, while to skirt laws is to get around them. Arwa Mahdawi uses the second kind in 2023 ("skirt child slavery laws"), and that kind carries a hint of evasion.
- 4To be on or form the border of a place.
Pine forests skirt the northern shore of the lake.
A gravel track skirted the estate's eastern edge.
Similarborder, line, fringe, edge, flank
Note
The verb of standing still: the subject is the edge itself, such as trees, vales or a railway line. It is comfortable in the passive ("The plain was skirted by rows of trees"). A 1953 Railway Magazine report has a line that "skirts the left bank" of an estuary, so the edge can be a long route that never moves. Contrast the traveling sense, where someone goes along the edge.
- 5The part of a dress, robe, or similar garment that hangs below the waist.
The skirt of the wedding gown trailed several feet behind her.
Mud splattered the skirt of his long coat.
Note
Here the word names a part of a garment, not a garment of its own, and it is not only women's wear. In Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (1912), a man's companion is "plucking at my skirts," meaning the hanging part of his coat. The plural comes naturally when the cloth is full. Ada S. Ballin, writing in 1885, counts "petticoats and skirts" as the heaviest part of dress.
- 6The border, edge, margin, or outermost part of something.
The travelers rested on the skirt of the great forest.
New houses spread out toward the skirt of the city.
Similaredge, fringe, border, margin, periphery
Note
The garment's hem, stretched over land and, in poetry, over ideas. Shakespeare's As You Like It keeps the picture in view: "the skirts of the forest, like fringe upon a petticoat." Keats places a ghost "upon the skirts of human-nature," and Tennyson writes of "the skirts of self." The usual shape is plural with of: the skirts of something.
- 7A loose edging of fabric attached to some part of a dress.
A ruffled skirt of silk edged the neckline of the gown.
She pinned a loose skirt of lace around the cuff.
Similarfrill, flounce, ruffle, trim
Note
A trimming rather than a garment: a strip of loose fabric that hangs from one part of a dress. Joseph Addison, writing in The Guardian in 1713, describes "a small skirt of fine ruffled linen" running along the top of the stays and across the breast. He says it was called the modesty piece. In this sense the skirt can sit anywhere on the dress, not just at the waist.
- 8To cover something with a skirt, or to surround it.
Flower beds skirt the fountain in the courtyard.
A ring of oaks skirted the meadow.
Similarsurround, encircle, ring, border, edge
Note
The verb at its most literal: to dress something in a skirt. Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) has an angel's wings that "skirted his loins and thighs with downy gold." From covering, the meaning widens to surrounding, so flower beds or a ring of trees can skirt what they enclose. That wider use overlaps with bordering.
- 9A derogatory slang word for a woman.
A skirt like her wasn't going to fall for his old tricks.
The detective brushed past, muttering about some skirt who'd lied to him.
Note
Clothing standing in for its wearer: the garment of the everyday skirt becomes the woman inside it, and that reduction is the insult. It sits naturally with a dismissive determiner, as in a skirt or some skirt. Robert E. Howard's Alleys of Peril (1931) has a Cockney grumbling about working for one. Treat it as derogatory slang. It fits hard-boiled pastiche or quoted speech, but it is out of place anywhere a woman is described in earnest.
- 10
Less common meanings
- 11British slang for women regarded collectively as objects of sexual interest.
He claimed the seaside town was full of skirt in summer.
The pub gets crowded with skirt on Friday nights.
Note
Here the word becomes a mass noun, taking no article and no plural: full of skirt, plenty of skirt. That grammar is the whole difference from the slang for one woman, where a skirt picks out an individual. It belongs to British colloquial speech and carries the same objectifying edge. It suits characterization and reported talk rather than anything said in one's own voice.
- 12British slang for sexual intercourse with a woman.
He measured a good leave by how much skirt he got.
The older men joked that the new recruit was only after skirt.
Note
This British use is hard to separate from women as a sexual category, and it shares that sense's barroom register. The test is the verb. When women are seen or counted, it is that sense. When someone gets skirt or is after it, the word means the act itself. Like its neighbor, it is uncountable and crude.
- 13The diaphragm or midriff: the muscular wall between the chest and the abdomen.
The chef seasoned the skirt and seared it in a hot pan.
Butchers separate the skirt from the inner wall of the carcass.
Note
A word for animals, not people. Skirt names the diaphragm of a carcass, which is why it turns up at the butcher's counter and in the kitchen rather than in a doctor's office. For a person's diaphragm or midriff, use those words instead; calling a human midriff "skirt" would be read as the garment.
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Origin
From Middle English skyrte, from Old Norse skyrta, and ultimately from Proto-Germanic *skurtijǭ. It is a doublet of shirt, and is related to Dutch schort and German Schürze ("apron").