Word.ws English Dictionary

sken

/skɛn/

sken verb: to squint.

Verb

sken (third-person singular simple present skens, present participle skenning, simple past and past participle skenned)

  1. (Northern-English) to squint
    • He skens ill enough to crack a lookin'-glass.1861, Edwin Waugh, The Birtle Carter's Tale About Owd Bodle
    • She's about seventy and skens like a basket of whelks, but she's as good as any doctor.1989, Marie Joseph, A World Apart, page 344
  2. (Northern-English) to glance

Forms of sken

third-person singular presentskens
present participleskenning
past participleskenned
pastskenned

Origin of sken

Obscure origin, possibly related to askance.

Words that rhyme with sken

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about sken

What does sken mean?
Sken means to squint.
What part of speech is sken?
Sken is a verb.
How do you pronounce sken?
Sken is pronounced /skɛn/.
What is the past tense of sken?
The past tense of sken is skenned.

Words near sken in the dictionary

  1. Skeltons
  2. skelum
  3. skelums
  4. Skelwith
  5. Skelwith Bridge
  6. sken
  7. Skenandore
  8. Skenandores
  9. skene
  10. skene dhu
  11. skene dhus

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: sken (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-sken.wav.

Cite this entry: “sken.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sken. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.