Other forms: skirts, skirting, skirted
A skirt is clothing that hangs from the waist with no separate legs. A long skirt, pleated skirt, school skirt.
As a verb it means to go round the edge of something — the road skirts the lake — and to skirt an issue is to avoid it while appearing to address it. Note that skirt and shirt are the same Norse and English word arriving twice, which is why they look so alike.
1nounskirtClothing hanging from the waist with no separate legs.
“She wore a short black skirt with a white blouse.”
2verbroundTo go round the edge of something.
“The path skirts the edge of the lake.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
skirt is a garment.
Old Norse skyrta means a shirt, from a root meaning short. English shirt is the native form of the same word.
Proto-Indo-European
*(s)ker-
Middle English
skyrte
English, today
skirt
Built from
From Middle English skyrte. From Middle English scyrt, skirt, skyrte, skyrthe, skyrtte, from Old Norse skyrta, from Proto-Germanic skurtijǭ (“apron; skirt”), from skurtaz (“short; deficient”), from skertaną (“to cut off”), from Proto-Indo-European (s)ker- (“to cut off; to divide”). a doublet of shirt. 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA