Other forms: skyscrapers
A skyscraper is a building so tall it seems to touch the clouds. A glass skyscraper, build a skyscraper, the skyscraper district.
There is no agreed height, though about a hundred and fifty metres is a common threshold and supertall means three hundred. Skyscrapers became possible because of two inventions together: the steel frame, which carries the load, and the safety lift, without which nobody would climb. Note that the word was originally a nautical term for the highest sail on a mast, and before that a tall horse.
1nounskyscraperA very tall building.
“From the top of the skyscraper, the cars below looked like toys.”
skyscraper is a tall building.
Skyscraper named the topmost small sail on a square-rigged ship, and was also used of anything unusually tall — a tall person, a high hat. Chicago architects borrowed it in the 1880s for the new steel-framed towers.
sky + scraper, first applied to tall steel-frame buildings in American cities such as New York City and Chicago in the 1880s.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA