skinny

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for skinny is 6 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈskɪni/. Corpus data places it at rank #7,285 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 5 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 8 documented wrong-spelling variants for skinny, with forms such as "ksinny", "siknny", and "skinnyy". 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 14 confusable-pair relationships, "sunny", "skins", "sonny", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English skinny (“resembling skin”), equivalent to skin + -y. The meaning associated with lack of fat or muscle possibly derives from the phrase skin and bones; the meaning associated with nudity refers to the exposed skin. 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 skinny, spelled S-K-I-N-N-Y, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.