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skiff

UK/skɪf/US/skɪf/
nounC1Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #9,476 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: skiffs

A skiff is a small light boat for one or two people. Row a skiff, a flat-bottomed skiff, tie up the skiff.

The word covers a range of small craft rather than one design: a Thames skiff is a slim rowing boat, and in America a skiff is often a shallow flat-bottomed fishing boat with an outboard. What they share is being light enough to handle alone.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir · Public domain

Definitions of skiff

  1. 1nounskiffA small light boat for one or two people.C1

    “The fisherman rowed his little skiff out across the calm lake at dawn.”

skiff is a boat.

Where it comes from

Middle French esquif comes from an Italian word for a small boat, itself from a Germanic word that also gave ship.

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *skey-

  2. Proto-Germanic

    *skipą — boat, ship

  3. lng

    skif — boat

  4. roa-oit

    schifo — small boat

  5. Middle French

    esquif

  6. Middle English

    skif

  7. English, today

    skiff

From Middle English skif, from Middle French esquif, from roa-oit schifo (“small boat”), from lng skif (“boat”), from Proto-Germanic skipą (“boat, ship”). a doublet of ship.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire

Practise this word

skiff in the wild

  • The Hydroscaphidae are a small family of water beetles known commonly as skiff beetles.

    Hydroscaphidae

  • The first trans Atlantic passage by a rowboat was made by George Herbo and Frank Samuelson on an 18-foot Jersey skiff (named Fox) on June 6, 1896.

    Jersey Skiff

  • The Sea Bright Skiff is a box-skegged skiff developed on the northern shore of New Jersey.

    Sea Bright Skiff

  • The Musto Skiff is a single-handed sailing skiff with a length of 4.55 m.

    Musto Skiff

  • A skiff is any of a variety of essentially unrelated styles of small boats, usually propelled by sails or oars.

    Skiff

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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.