Skip to content
ARCHIEENGLISH
LearnPlayWordsRanking
  • Learn
  • Play
  • Words
  • Ranking
  • Mine
← Vocabulary

scaly

UK/ˈskeɪli/US/ˈskeɪli/
adjectiveB2+Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #11,897 of 15,258neutral

Scaly means covered in small hard overlapping plates. Scaly skin, a scaly tail, dry and scaly.

It describes fish and reptiles literally and skin conditions medically, where scaly is the word for flaking patches. Bird legs are scaly too, which is one of the visible reminders that they are dinosaurs.

Definitions of scaly

  1. 1adjectivescalyCovered in small hard overlapping plates.B2+

    “The lizard's scaly skin felt cool and dry in my hand.”

scaly is a quality.

Where it comes from

From scale plus -y, from Old French escale, a shell or husk.

  1. Middle English

    scali

  2. English, today

    scaly

From Middle English scali, skaly. by surface analysis, en + scale + -y.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

scaly in the wild

  • The scaly thrush (Zoothera dauma) is a member of the thrush family Turdidae.

    Scaly thrush

  • The scaly-sided merganser or Chinese merganser (Mergus squamatus) is an endangered typical merganser (genus Mergus).

    Scaly-sided merganser

  • The scaly-naped pigeon (Patagioenas squamosa), also known as the red-necked pigeon, is a bird belonging to the family Columbidae.

    Scaly-naped pigeon

  • The green-legged partridge (Tropicoperdix chloropus), also known as the scaly-breasted partridge or green-legged hill-partridge, is a bird species in the family Phasianidae.

    Green-legged partridge

  • The scaly spurfowl (Pternistis squamatus) is a species of bird in the family Phasianidae.

    Scaly spurfowl

1 / 2

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

  • scale
  • descale