skift
/skɪft/
skift noun: synonym of skiff (“light shower of rain or snow; light dusting of snow or ice (on ground, water, etc)”).
Noun
skift (plural skifts)
- Synonym of skiff (“light shower of rain or snow; light dusting of snow or ice (on ground, water, etc)”).
- Last night we had a little skift of snow.1834, record quoted in 1956, Norman E. Eliason, Tarheel Talk, page 294
- Well, there was a little skift of snow on the ground, and I follered up a ridge of the mountain […]1857, “A Winter in the South”, in Harper's Magazine, page 726
- Synonyms:
- skiff
Verb
skift (third-person singular simple present skifts, present participle skifting, simple past and past participle skifted)
- Synonym of skiff (“fall lightly or briefly, and lightly cover the ground”).
- A mourning dove had returned to him through snow, skifting over cold earth. It settled on a limb and began dressing its plumage.1911, Gene Stratton-Porter, The Harvester, page 46
- […] Violent gusts of wind came in rapid succession down the sound of Kilbrannan ; and a skifting rain, flung fitfully but fiercely from the huge black clouds as they hurried along before the tempest that ...1921, Ernest Rhys, The Haunters & the Haunted: Ghost Stories and Tales of the Supernatural, page 153
- Synonyms:
- skiff
- To shift; to move or remove.
- Aw could like yo to skift, afore aw […]1867, Edwin Waugh, Owd Blanket, page 10
- And a man mun keep watch at t mill toft / To stiddy his mouter-dish — help him to sift it, / And see it's o' tidily done; / And gedder up offal, and heàmmward to skift it, / And hev sooins as sure as a gun.1875, William Dickinson, Cumbriana; Or, Fragments of Cumbrian Life, page 231
Examples of skift in a sentence
- It was quite cold that morning; just a little skift of snow.1915, Ed Blair, History of Johnson County, Kansas, page 61:
- We just got out on the top and there was a little skift of snow a-fallin'.1939, Coll, Hall:
- There was just a little skift of snow on the ground.2001, Cincinnati Magazine, page 80:
- A skift of snow had fallen overnight on the ski trails, and Paul had yet to groom them and erase the tracks in the new snow.2010, Mark Parman, A Grouse Hunter’s Almanac: The Other Kind of Hunting, page 84:
Synonyms of skift
Forms of skift
| Noun | |
|---|---|
| plural | skifts |
| Verb | |
| third-person singular present | skifts |
| present participle | skifting |
| past participle | skifted |
| past | skifted |
Origin of skift
From Scots skift (“light shower of rain or snow”), related to skiff (“light rain, snow, etc”) (which see for more) and skiffle.
Words that rhyme with skift
Questions about skift
- What does skift mean?
- Skift means synonym of skiff (“light shower of rain or snow; light dusting of snow or ice (on ground, water, etc)”).
- How do you use skift in a sentence?
- It was quite cold that morning; just a little skift of snow.
- What part of speech is skift?
- Skift can be a noun or a verb.
- How do you pronounce skift?
- Skift is pronounced /skɪft/.
- What is the plural of skift?
- The plural of skift is skifts.
Words near skift in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: skift (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)-Flame, not lame-skift.wav.
Cite this entry: “skift.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/skift. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.