Word.ws English Dictionary

skim off

skim off verb: to separate (the best part of something from the remainder).

Verb

skim off (third-person singular simple present skims off, present participle skimming off, simple past and past participle skimmed off)

  1. To separate (the best part of something from the remainder).
    • There was also the influx of a third of a million road lorries, sold at giveaway prices after their war roles ceased and used by competing one-man businesses to skim off sundry agricultural freight.2023 March 8, Howard Johnston, “Was Marples the real railway wrecker?”, in RAIL, number 978, page 51

Forms of skim off

third-person singular presentskims off
present participleskimming off
past participleskimmed off
pastskimmed off

Questions about skim off

What does skim off mean?
Skim off means to separate (the best part of something from the remainder).
What part of speech is skim off?
Skim off is a verb.
What is the past tense of skim off?
The past tense of skim off is skimmed off.

Words near skim off in the dictionary

  1. skim
  2. skim coat
  3. skim coats
  4. skim milk
  5. skim milks
  6. skim off
  7. skim pit
  8. skim pits
  9. skim through
  10. skim-coat
  11. skim-coated

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: skim off (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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Cite this entry: “skim off.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/skim_off. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.