sky
/skaɪ/ noun, verb, proper noun
Forms skies skying skied skyed skie
- noun The atmosphere above a given point, especially as visible from the surface of the Earth as the place where the sun, moon, stars, and clouds are seen. “That year, a meteor fell from the sky.”
- noun With a descriptive word: the part of the sky which can be seen from a specific place or at a specific time; its climate, condition, etc. “I lay back under a warm Texas sky.”
- noun (chiefly literary and poetic, archaic) Usually preceded by the: the abode of God or the gods, angels, the souls of deceased people, etc.; heaven; also, powers emanating from heaven. “This mortal has incurred the wrath of the skies.”
- noun (mathematics, theoretical physics) The set of all lightlike lines (or directions) passing through a given point in space-time.
- noun (obsolete, informal, rare) In an art gallery: the upper rows of pictures that cannot easily be seen; also, the place where such pictures are hung.
- noun (obsolete) A cloud.
- verb (informal) To drink (a beverage) from a container without one's lips touching the container.
- verb (informal, dated) To hang (a picture on exhibition) near the top of a wall, where it cannot easily be seen; (by extension) to put (something) in an undesirable place.
- verb (slang, dated) To toss (something) upwards; specifically, to flip (a coin).
- verb To clear (a high jump bar, hurdle, etc.) by a large margin.
- verb (ball games) To hit, kick, or throw (a ball) extremely high.
- verb (soccer) To miss a goal by kicking the ball over the crossbar.
- verb (obsolete) To raise (the price of an item on auction, or the level of the bids generally) by bidding high.
- verb To move quickly, as if by flying; to fly; also, to escape, to flee (especially by airplane).
- noun (UK, slang, obsolete, Westminster School) A disagreeable person; an enemy.
- proper noun A surname.
- proper noun A unisex given name from English.
Synonyms
blue firmament heaven lift welkin celestial sphere flip toss pitch
Antonyms
Etymology
The noun is derived from Middle English sky (“sky; cloud; mist”), also spelled ski, skie, [and other forms], from Old Norse ský (“cloud”), from Proto-Germanic *skiwją (“cloud; sky”), from *skiwô (“cloud; cloud cover, haze; sky”) (whence Old English sċēo (“cloud”) and Middle English skew (“air; sky; (rare) cloud”)), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)kewH- (“to cover; to conceal, hide”).
Partly displaced Old English heofon, which survives in the reflex heaven, still sometimes used in the sense of sky, but usually in high or poetic register.
The verb is derived from the noun.
The English word is cognate with Old English scēo (“cloud”), Old Saxon scio, skio, skeo (“light cloud cover”), Danish, Swedish and Norwegian Bokmål sky (“cloud”), Old Irish ceo (“mist, fog”), Irish ceo (“mist, fog”). It is also related to Old English scūa (“shadow, darkness”), Latin obscūrus (“dark, shadowy”), Sanskrit स्कुनाति (skunāti, “he covers”). See also hide, hose, house, hut, shoe.
From Volsci (“a tribe who opposed the Romans”).
From sky. As a surname, a translation of German Himmel and an anglicization of Ashkenazic surnames ending in -sky.
Webster’s 1913
- noun A cloud. [Obs.]
- noun Hence, a shadow. [Obs.]
- verb To hang (a picture on exhibition) near the top of a wall, where it can not be well seen. [Colloq.]
- verb To throw towards the sky; as, to sky a ball at cricket. [Colloq.]
Etymology [OE. skie a cloud, Icel. sk; akin to Sw. & Dan. sky; cf. AS. sc, sc, shadow, Icel. skuggi; probably from the same root as E. scum. sq. root158. See Scum, and cf. Hide skin, Obscure.]
Sources: Wiktionary · WordNet 3.0 · Webster’s 1913 — from the Wiktionary entry “sky”, CC BY-SA 4.0. Details