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skim

UK/skɪm/US/skɪm/
verbB24 meaningsOccasional — familiar, but not everyday · #8,967 of 15,258leans spoken

Other forms: skimming, skimmed, skims

To skim is to take only the top. You skim the fat off a stew with a big spoon; you skim a page, eyes running down the middle, catching the headings and the first line of each paragraph and nothing else.

A flat stone skims across a pond, touching the water three or four times before it sinks — the same word, the same idea of staying on the surface. Skimmed milk has had the cream lifted off it. With reading it wants through or over: you skim through a report, you skim over the boring middle. Skimming and scanning are two different jobs, and swapping them will get you marked down — you skim to find out what a text is about, and you scan when you already know what you are hunting for and want the one line that holds it. There is a dishonest sense as well: a cashier who skims takes a little out of the till each day, and a skimmer clipped over a cash machine steals card numbers the same quiet way.

Definitions of skim

  1. 1verbskimTo read something fast, taking in the main points and leaving the rest.B2

    “She skimmed the first page and put it down.”

    • Said"I only skimmed the report; give me the two-line version."
    • WrittenShe skimmed the letter standing at the door, caught one sorry, and sat down.
    • UsedSkim the headings first, then read the sections that matter.
    • ContrastSkim, not read. Reading takes every word in order; skimming takes the shape of the page and moves on. read →
    • Not thisSkimming fat off a soup is another meaning. This skim is for pages.
    • Exchange"Did you read it?""Skimmed it. Nothing new."
    • SimplyI skim the newspaper. Only the big words.

    Patternskim + noun (a report, the headlines) · skim through / over sth · skim-read · skimming

    synonyms: glance through, read quickly

  2. 2verbliftTo lift the floating layer off the top of a liquid.B2

    “Skim the foam off the jam before you jar it.”

    • Said"Can you skim the gravy before we serve it?"
    • WrittenEvery few minutes she skimmed the grey foam from the top of the stock.
    • UsedSkim off any fat as it rises.
    • ContrastSkim, not strain. Straining pours everything through a net; skimming lifts only the thin layer on top. strain →
    • Exchange"Why is there oil floating on the soup?""Skim it off with a big spoon."
    • SimplyTake off only the top. That is skimming.

    Patternskim + noun (the fat, the foam) off + noun · skim off · skimmed milk

  3. 3verbmoveTo move lightly across a surface, barely touching it.B2

    “The stone skimmed three times before it sank.”

  4. 4verbtakeTo take small amounts of money dishonestly, a little at a time.C1

    “He had been skimming money from the till for years.”

Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.

Also accepted in games: scan

Remember it

SKI-m → a SKI along the top

A single ski slides along the top of the soup and lifts off only the thin layer floating there. Run it along a page and it touches only the first words of every line.

Phrases it lives in

  • skim the surface — deal with only the most obvious part of a subject
  • skim through something — read it fast from beginning to end

Also practised as

  • verbTo lift the floating layer off the top of a liquid.

Where it comes from

Skim and scum grew from one Germanic word for foam. Old French escumer meant to take the froth off, from escume, the stuff that gathers on top of a boiling pot. Skimming a book is that same motion: you lift what floats and leave the rest in the pan.

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *skew- — to cover, conceal

  2. Proto-Germanic

    *skūmaz — foam

  3. Frankish

    *skūm — froth, foam

  4. Old French

    escumer — to remove scum

  5. Middle English

    skemen

  6. English, today

    skim

Built from

  • escume · Old French — froth, foam

From Middle English skemen, skymen, variants of scumen, from Old French escumer (“to remove scum”), from escume (“froth, foam”), from Frankish skūm (“froth, foam”), from Proto-Germanic skūmaz (“foam”), from Proto-Indo-European skew- (“to cover, conceal”). See scum.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Academic English, A Man Called Ove, Ways of Looking, Libraries & Museums

First appears in chapter 15 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

skim in the wild

  • The Korean version includes water, liquid fructose, sugar, skim milk powder, carbon dioxide, and citric acid.

    Ambasa

  • Toned milk is a method, developed in India, of treating buffalo milk by adding skim milk, powdered skim milk and water to it.

    Toned milk

  • Baleen whales use their baleen plates to filter out food from the water by either lunge-feeding or skim-feeding.

    Baleen whale

  • Right whales skim-feed, meaning they use their enlarged head to effectively take in a large amount of water and sieve the slow-moving prey.

    Baleen whale

  • AT THE BOILING POINT ADD A DASH OF COLD WINE, RETIRE FROM STOVE AND SKIM.

    Cookery and Dining in Imperial Rome· Apicius

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.

From Project Gutenberg, public domain. These sentences are from real books, shown to illustrate the word at work.

Related words

  • skimp