Word.ws English Dictionary

skin deep

skin deep is the alternative form of skin-deep.

Meaning of skin-deep

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
    Antonyms:
    bone-deep

Questions about skin deep

What is skin deep the alternative form of?
Skin deep is the alternative form of skin-deep.

Words near skin deep in the dictionary

  1. skin colors
  2. skin colour
  3. skin colours
  4. skin cream
  5. skin creams
  6. skin deep
  7. skin diving
  8. skin dresser
  9. skin dressers
  10. skin effect
  11. skin effects

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: skin deep (page history and authors); skin-deep (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:

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