skain

Noun

skein (plural skeins)

1. A quantity of thread, yarn, etc., wound on a reel then removed and loosely knotted into an oblong shape; a skein of cotton is formed by eighty turns of thread around a reel with a fifty-four inch diameter.
   • Some for very nede / Layde downe a skeyne of threde, / And some a skeyne of yarne; […]c. 1517 (date written; published c. 1545), John Skelton, “Here after Foloweth the Booke Called Elynour Rummynge. The Tunnyng of Elynour Rummyng per Skelton Laureat.”, in Alexander Dyce, editor, The...
2. (broadly) The membrane of a fish ovary.
3. (UK, broadly, collective, dialectal) A group of wildfowl (for example, geese or swans) in flight.
   • High above the swallows and 2 miles or so out into the Channel was a skein of geese, probably brent geese on the first day of their emigration from the estuaries of the Channel coast towards the high Arctic tundra of Spitsbergen or Russia.2018, Laurence Rose, “France”, in The Long Spring: Tracking the Arrival of Spring through Europe, London: Bloomsbury Wildlife, →ISBN, page 111
4. (also, attributive, broadly, obsolete) Synonym of spireme (“the tangled mass of strands of chromatin seen in the early stages of mitosis, originally believed to be a single continuous strand (or two in a diploid cell, etc.)”).

   Synonyms:

   spireme

5. (figuratively) A tangle, a weave, a web.
   • Not that I ſee through his perplexed plots, / And hidden ends, nor that my parts depend / Vpon the vnvvinding this ſo knotted skeane, / Doe I beſeech your patience.1625 (first performance), Ben[jamin] Jonson, The Staple of Newes. […], London: […] I[ohn] B[eale] for Robert Allot […], published 1631, →OCLC, Act V, scene ii, page 68
6. (figuratively) A winning streak.

See all 11 meanings of skein