skim

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for skim is 4 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /skɪm/. Corpus data places it at rank #23,397 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 13 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 6 documented wrong-spelling variants for skim, with forms such as "ksim", "sikm", and "skimm". Each variant represents a distinct typo pattern that appears often enough in corpora to be worth flagging, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution.It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "SM", "sky", "sum", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: 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”)… Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is skim, spelled S-K-I-M, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.