Word.ws English Dictionary

skinnie

skinnie noun: someone of Somali descent.

Noun (1)

skinnie (plural skinnies)

  1. (derogatory, ethnic, plural-normally, slang, slur, uncommon) Someone of Somali descent.
    • Hey, watch out for skinnies. They're all over the rooftops.2000, Ken Nolan (contributor), Black Hawk Down, The Shooting Script, page 94
    • It was not long before many UNITAF personnel in Mogadishu and the outlying HRSs began referring to the Somalis as “skinnies,” or using other derogatory terms.2011, Robert F. Baumann, "My Clan Against the World" - Us and Coalition Forces in Somalia 1992-1994

Noun (2) capitalized: Skinnie

Skinnie (plural Skinnies)

  1. Alternative letter-case form of skinnie

Forms of skinnie

pluralskinnies
alternative formSkinnie
pluralSkinnies

Origin of skinnie

Named by American soldiers stationed in Somalia who felt that Somali culture was strange enough to seem "alien", comparing the Somalis to a race of aliens from the novel "Starship Troopers", which was popular among American soldiers. This term was not related to the famine in Somalia in the 1990's.

Questions about skinnie

What does skinnie mean?
Skinnie means someone of Somali descent.
What part of speech is skinnie?
Skinnie is a noun.
What is the plural of skinnie?
The plural of skinnie is skinnies.

Words near skinnie in the dictionary

  1. Skinners Flat
  2. Skinners Shoot
  3. skinnery
  4. skinnes
  5. skinneth
  6. skinnie
  7. skinnied
  8. skinnied down
  9. skinnied out
  10. skinnied up
  11. skinnier

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: skinnie (page history and authors); Skinnie (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: “skinnie.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/skinnie. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.