skin and bones
"skin-and-bones" is a 12-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“skin and bones” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a noun. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 14
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - A person or an animal that is emaciated or very thin, as from lack of nutrition.
Corpus desk
Index EN-skin-and-bones · skin and bones · English
skin and bones · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-MEGA 14 letters
- VOW-4 4 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "S" thin
- PHOTO-UNK Peer pending
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | skin and bones |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| Letters | 14 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “skin and bones” in English
Rare enough to double-check
skin and bones is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as anoun. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. Gloss: "A person or an animal that is emaciated or very thin, as from lack of nutrition.".
No misspelling variants are generated for skin and bones in our index, and the word's spelling is regular enough that our generator found nothing worth flagging. No close-neighbour confusable shows up for this headword in our dataset, which typically means the spelling is too distinctive to be mistaken for another word.
This headword's origin isn't recorded in our source data, so any spelling logic here comes from how the word's sounds map to letters, not a documented origin story. The correct English form is skin and bones, spelled S-K-I-N- -A-N-D- -B-O-N-E-S.
Definition
- 1A person or an animal that is emaciated or very thin, as from lack of nutrition.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how skin and bones appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
Look at that starving dog; he's nothing more than skin and bones.
"Eh, good evening, sir," she said to me, as she drew herself up to make the best of her own inflated bulky appearance, "come and sit down here and tell me how it fares with you; but, by my troth, you are nothing but skin and bones!"
This word in other languages
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.