Other forms: skins
Skin is the soft outside cover of your body. Dry skin, under the skin, skin and bone.
It is the largest organ, about two square metres in an adult, and it does far more than cover — temperature, sensation, water, vitamin D. It also names the outside of fruit and of milk left to cool. Note by the skin of your teeth, meaning only just; get under somebody's skin; skin deep; and that in gaming a skin is a cosmetic appearance for a character.
1nounskinThe soft outside cover of your body.
“Adult skin covers about two square metres.”
2nounlayerThe outside layer of a fruit or a liquid.
“Peel the skin off the banana before you eat it.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
skin is an outer covering.
Old Norse skinn meant animal hide, and it partly displaced Old English hyd, which survives as hide. The root means to split off, since a skin was flayed from the animal.
Middle English
skyn
English, today
skin
Built from
From Middle English skyn. From Middle English skyn, skinn, from Old English scinn, from Old Norse skinn (“animal hide”), from Proto-Germanic skinþą, from Proto-Indo-European sken- (“to split off”), nasal variant of skeh₁i-d- (“to cut”). Partially displaced native Old English hȳd (“skin, hide”), from which derives hide. Cognate with Dutch schinde (“bark”), dialectal German Schinde (“fruit peel”); also Breton skant (“scales”), Old Irish cenn (“covering, shell”), Irish scáin (“to tear, burst”), Latin scindō (“to split, divide”), Sanskrit छिनत्ति (“to split”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA