Skite

//skaɪt// noun, verb, slang

noun, verb, slang ·Moderate ·High school level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A sudden hit or blow; a glancing blow. obsolete
  2. 2
    Alternative spelling of skete. alt-of, alternative
  3. 3
    A trick.
  4. 4
    A contemptible person.

    "When Carey told on Skin-the-Goat / O'Donnell caught him on the boat / He wished he'd never been afloat / The dirty skite."

  5. 5
    A drinking binge. Ireland

    "I needed alcohol to stop my nerves rattling. This felt like the longest period I'd been without my drug of choice for at least three years. I needed to go on a skite."

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  1. 6
    One who skites; a boaster. Australia, Ireland, New-Zealand

    "[T]he Rooster was one of those fine, upstanding, bumptious skites who love to talk all day, in the heartiest manner, to total strangers while their wives do the washing."

  2. 7
    A whimsical or leisurely trip. Ireland

    "We're going on a skite to Dublin."

Verb
  1. 1
    To boast. Australia, Ireland, New-Zealand

    "You boast and skite from morn to night / And think you're very brave, / But the men who really did the job / Are dead and in their graves."

  2. 2
    To skim or slide along a surface. uncommon

    "[…] skiting down that steep slope. But it's one thing to slide down a steep slope and quite another thing to climb back up - as Mary Jane soon discovered. Try her hardest , she simply could not get up that hill; she slid down faster than she went up."

  3. 3
    To slip, such as on ice. Scotland, especially

    "At this point I skited on a discarded banana and decided to use my eyes instead of my brains."

  4. 4
    To move swiftly; to move in leaps and bounds.

    "His very shuttle skytes boldly along, and clatters through in faithful time to the tune of his merrier shopmates!"

  5. 5
    To pop, to quickly or briefly make a trip to.

    "[…] skiting over to Europe and back before you know it, taking notes on the way going and coming ."

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  1. 6
    To drink a large amount of alcohol. Scotland, slang
  2. 7
    To defecate, to shit. archaic, vulgar

    "There is no need of wiping ones taile (said Gargantua), but when it is foule; foule it cannot be unlesse one have been a skiting; skite then we must before we wipe our tailes."

Synonyms

All synonyms
skitter

Example

More examples

"When Carey told on Skin-the-Goat / O'Donnell caught him on the boat / He wished he'd never been afloat / The dirty skite."

Etymology

From Middle English skyt, skytte, skytt, from Old Norse skítr (“dung, faeces”), from Proto-Germanic *skītaz, *skitiz. Cognate with Old English sċite (“dung”). Doublet of shit and shite.

Related phrases

skite-the-gutter

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.