''skint'' ▫ᴱᴺ Entries

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''skint'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260717141042-00-⌔

skint - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Adjective

skint (comparativeskinter or more skint, superlativeskintest or most skint)

• (slang, UK, Commonwealth, Ireland) Penniless, poor, impecunious, broke.
  • ✤ There were a mixture of local people with cold, pinched faces and skint and harassed looking tourists sitting around fondling their itchsome facial hair, their tongues lolling into fizzy yellow pints of lager.¹
  • ✤ Mr Grave proceeded to give a stern warning to those “errant pupils” who, against the rules, had been smuggling their mobile phones into school. This was just about everyone, though Zoe was far too skint to even dream of ever owning one.²
  • ✤ About 2-3 weeks prior to Emma Finch’s death you told two of your friends Abi that “he hoped his Nan died soon because he was skint […] and […] that he thought he was the only one getting money in the will when she died”.³
• (slang) skinned

Etymology

The “penniless” sense is attested since 1925 and is derived from a variant of skinned.

Note also the phrase skin a flint (“go to extreme lengths for the sake of gain or economy”), from the brittleness and hardness of flint which makes it almost impossible to remove just its skin without shattering it.⁴

Pronunciation

• IPA: /skɪnt/
• (Scotland) IPA: /skʌnt/
• Audio (Australian): 🔊
• Audio (US): 🔊
• Rhymes: -ɪnt

Printed 2026-07-17.

(echo:: @ ⌗)

Footnotes

1. 2000, Tim Bradford, Is Shane MacGowan still alive?: ↩

2. 2012, David Walliams [pseudonym; David Edward Williams], Ratburger, London: HarperCollins Children’s Books, →ISBN: ↩

3. 2025 November 14, Michael Bowes, R v Joshua Powell, sentencing remarks ‎${}^{[1]}$, Paragraph 19: ↩

4. Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language: College Edition, Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company, 1962, page 1367 ↩

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