skirt

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for skirt is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /skɜːt/. Corpus data places it at rank #7,609 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 9 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 skirt, with forms such as "ksirt", "sikrt", and "skirrt". 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, "sort", "suit", "stir", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English skyrte, from Old Norse skyrta, from Proto-Germanic *skurtijǭ. Doublet of shirt. Cognate with Saterland Frisian Skoarte (“apron”), Dutch schort (“apron”), German Schürze (“apron”), Danish skørt (“skirt”), Swedish skört (“hem of a jacket”)… 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 skirt, spelled S-K-I-R-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.