Other forms: skills
A skill is something you can do well because you learned it and practised it. A useful skill, learn a new skill, communication skills.
The word implies training, which is what separates it from talent — a talent is what you were born with, a skill is what you built. It is countable for a particular ability and uncountable for the quality: great skill, a display of skill. Note the very common plural in job advertisements — skills, soft skills, transferable skills — and that skilled and skilful are different: skilled means trained, skilful means doing it well.
1nounskillAn ability learned through practice.
“Reading a map is a skill and it is disappearing.”
synonyms: ability, competence, expertise
2nounqualityThe quality of doing something well.
“It was done with enormous skill and no fuss.”
skill is a learned ability.
Old Norse skil meant a distinction or discernment, from a root meaning to split or separate — the same root as shell, scale and shield. A skill was originally the ability to tell one thing from another, which is a good description of what expertise actually is.
Proto-Indo-European
*(s)kelH-
Proto-Germanic
*skilją
Old Norse
skil
Middle English
skill
English, today
skill
From Middle English skill, from Old Norse skil, from Proto-Germanic skilją, from Proto-Indo-European (s)kelH-. From Middle English skill, skille (also schil, schile), from Old Norse skil (“a distinction, discernment, knowledge”), from Proto-Germanic skilją (“separation, limit”), from Proto-Indo-European (s)kelH- (“to split, cut”). Cognate with Danish skel (“a separation, boundary, divide”), Swedish skäl (“reason”), Dutch verschil (“difference”) and schillen (“to separate the outer layer (schil) from the product”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA