Other forms: skeletons
A skeleton is all the bones of a body together, in the arrangement that holds it up. The human skeleton, a dinosaur skeleton, a skeleton in a museum case.
The adult human skeleton has 206 bones; a baby is born with about 270, which fuse. The word also means the bare framework of anything — the steel skeleton of a building — and the bare outline of a plan: a skeleton argument, a skeleton draft. A skeleton staff is the smallest number of people who can keep something running. Note skeleton in the cupboard, meaning a shameful secret, which is closet in American English.
1nounskeletonAll the bones of a body together.
“A complete skeleton was found under the car park.”
2nounbareThe bare framework or outline of something.
“There is a skeleton of a plan and nothing more.”
skeleton is a framework of bones.
Greek skeletos meant dried up, from a verb meaning to parch. A skeleton is literally the dried thing — the body with everything soft gone, which is exactly what the Greeks would have been looking at when they named it.
Proto-Indo-European
*(s)kelh₁- — to parch, wither
Ancient Greek
σκελετός
New Latin
sceleton
English, today
skeleton
Built from
From New Latin sceleton, from Ancient Greek σκελετός, the neuter of σκελετός (“dried up, withered, dried body, parched, mummy”), from σκέλλω (“dry, dry up, make dry, parch”), from Proto-Indo-European (s)kelh₁- (“to parch, wither”); compare Ancient Greek σκληρός (“hard”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA