Word.ws English Dictionary

skep

/ˈskɛp/

skep noun: a basket.

skep: a basket
Image: Agnes Monkelbaan, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

skep (plural skeps)

  1. A basket.
    • Old women crouched over bags of Siamese rice, skeps of red and green peppers, purple egg-plants, bristly rambutans, pineapples, durians.1956, Anthony Burgess, Time for a Tiger (The Malayan Trilogy), published 1972, page 115
  2. A beehive made of straw or wicker.
    • Three of the hives had been overturned and the others had been rocked to and fro. The modern hive is a fearful thing to upset; the combs are not static as in a skep, but hang loosely: when the hive is overturned they smash and pile up like a telescoped train.1958, John Crompton, A Hive of Bees
    • He prised a skep from its stool and held it out, inverted, showing the dirty wreck of combs, with the vile grubs spinning their cocoons.1977, Patrick O'Brian, The Mauritius Command
    Synonyms:
    skip

Verb

skep (third-person singular simple present skeps, present participle skepping, simple past and past participle skepped)

  1. (transitive) To transfer (bees) into a skep.

skep meaning in Tamil

skep in Tamil

வரிக்கூடை, பிரப்பங்கூடை

Synonyms of skep

Forms of skep

Noun
pluralskeps
Verb
third-person singular presentskeps
present participleskepping
past participleskepped
pastskepped

Origin of skep

Late Old English sceppe, from Old Norse skeppa (“basket”). Cognate with Danish skæppe (“an old Danish unit of measure equalling 17.4 l”).

Words formed from skep

Words that rhyme with skep

9 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about skep

What does skep mean?
Skep means a basket.
What is skep in Tamil?
Skep in Tamil is வரிக்கூடை, பிரப்பங்கூடை. See Skep meaning in Tamil.
What part of speech is skep?
Skep can be a noun or a verb.
How do you pronounce skep?
Skep is pronounced /ˈskɛp/.
What is the plural of skep?
The plural of skep is skeps.

Words near skep in the dictionary

  1. skenning
  2. skens
  3. skeo
  4. skeos
  5. skeow-ways
  6. skep
  7. skepful
  8. skepfuls
  9. skepped
  10. skepping
  11. skeppist

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: skep (page history and authors); skep (Tamil Wiktionary) (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.

Last updated:

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

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