Other forms: skates
A skate is a boot with a blade or wheels for gliding along. Lace up your skates, ice skates, roller skates.
The ice kind glides on a thin slippery layer at the surface, and the old explanation that pressure melts it is now thought wrong — the surface is slippery anyway. A skate is also a flat sea fish, related to the ray, which is a different word.
1nounskateA boot with a blade or wheels for gliding.
“She laced up her skates and stepped carefully onto the ice.”
skate is a boot, or a fish.
From Dutch schaats, from an Old French word for a stilt. The fish is a separate word from Old Norse.
Frankish
*skakkjā — stilt
Middle Dutch
schāetse
Dutch
schaats
English, today
skate
Built from
a back-formation from from Dutch schaats, from Middle Dutch schāetse, from fro-nor - escache (“a stilt, trestle”) (compare French échasse and English scatch), from a gem - language, perhaps Frankish skakkjā (“stilt”) literally “thing that moves”, related to skakan (“to shake, swing”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA