Word.ws English Dictionary

skin-deep

skin-deep adjective: shallow, superficial.

Adjective

skin-deep (not comparable)

  1. (figuratively) Shallow, superficial.
    • Dead enough; to live thenceforth a galvanic life of mere Stump-Oratory; screeching and gibbering, words without wisdom, without veracity, without conviction more than skin-deep.1850 May 1, Thomas Carlyle, “No. V. Stump-Orator.”, in Latter-Day Pamphlets, London: Chapman and Hall, […], →OCLC, page 180
    • Would the wicked river drag me down by the heels, indeed? and look so beautiful all the time? Nature’s good-humour was only skin-deep after all.1878, Robert Louis Stevenson, An Inland Voyage, London: C[harles] Kegan Paul & Co., […], →OCLC
    Antonyms:
    bone-deep

skin-deep meaning in Malayalam and Vietnamese

skin-deep in Malayalam

ഉപരിപ്ലവമായ, അഗാധമല്ലാത്ത, തൊലിപ്പുറമേയുളള, ഉപരിതലത്തിലുള്ള

skin-deep in Vietnamese

superficial
bề ngoài

Examples of skin-deep in a sentence

  • “He calls himself a white man,” answered the Master-Attendant scornfully; “but if so, it’s just skin-deep and no more.1902, Joseph Conrad, “The End of the Tether”, in Youth: A Narrative: And Two Other Stories, Edinburgh; London: William Blackwood and sons...
  • She was wantonly aesthetic; but she was an excellent creature, kind and good natured; and her affectations were but skin-deep.1915, W[illiam] Somerset Maugham, chapter XLVII, in Of Human Bondage, New York, N.Y.: George H[enry] Doran Company, →OCLC:
  • The painter smiled at once, his bright, skin-deep smile.1919 October, John Galsworthy, chapter 1, in Saint’s Progress, London: William Heinemann, published December 1919, →OCLC, part III, page...
  • What news stories like this really show is that the rampant technology fetishism, which runs like e-wildfire through our i-society, is really only skin-deep.2010 July 24, Guy Dammann, “Technology fetishism is skin deep”, in The Guardian, →ISSN:

Antonyms of skin-deep

Forms of skin-deep

alternative formskin deep

Phrases with skin-deep

Questions about skin-deep

What does skin-deep mean?
Skin-deep means shallow, superficial.
What is skin-deep in Malayalam?
Skin-deep in Malayalam is ഉപരിപ്ലവമായ, അഗാധമല്ലാത്ത, തൊലിപ്പുറമേയുളള. See Skin-deep meaning in Malayalam.
How do you use skin-deep in a sentence?
“He calls himself a white man,” answered the Master-Attendant scornfully; “but if so, it’s just skin-deep and no more.
What part of speech is skin-deep?
Skin-deep is an adjective.

Words near skin-deep in the dictionary

  1. skin wool
  2. skin worm
  3. skin worms
  4. skin-art
  5. skin-crawling
  6. skin-deep
  7. skin-dive
  8. skin-dived
  9. skin-diver
  10. skin-divers
  11. skin-dives

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: skin-deep (page history and authors); skin-deep (Malayalam 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)-Flame, not lame-skin-deep.wav.

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