Word.ws English Dictionary

skinship

/ˈskɪnʃɪp/

skinship noun: bonding through physical (touch, skin-to-skin) contact; particularly between family members, relatives and loved ones.

Noun

skinship (uncountable)

  1. Bonding through physical (touch, skin-to-skin) contact; particularly between family members, relatives and loved ones.
    • He explained that sufficient skinship in child-rearing prevents the occurrence of psychosis in Japan.1966, Hisako Kokubu, “Psychosis”, in Child-rearing practices and cultural issues in Japanese personality development, Michigan State University, Cultural Personality of the Japanese People (section...
    • In Mexico, interdependence among people in emphasized and expressed through cosleeping and "skinship." … A similar type of "skinship" also exists throughout Mexico—all one had to do is look at the way people walk or sit together. … women are always patting touching ...1994, Nicole Landry Sault, Many Mirrors: Body Image and Social Relations, Rutgers University Press, →ISBN, page 311
  2. Spending time together naked for social bonding.
    • This relationship of parents to children is especially enhanced by bathing together—commonly known as skinship (sukinshippu). Other groups, from businessmen or to neighboring housewives to hikers and classmates, often seek to increase the strength of a relationship by engaging in hadaka no tsukiai...1992, Scott Clark, “The Japanese Bath: Extraordinarily Ordinary”, in Joseph Jay Tobin, editor, Re-made in Japan: Everyday Life and Consumer Taste in a Changing Society (social science), Yale...

skinship meaning in Thai

skinship in Thai

bonding through physical contact
สกินชิพ sà-gin-chíp

Examples of skinship in a sentence

  • However, there were times that folks needed that skinship to feel hearten'd and Dan often felt when others had that need.2015, LT Wolf, The World King (fiction), →ISBN:
  • This relationship of parents to children is especially enhanced by bathing together—commonly known as skinship (sukinshippu).1992, Scott Clark, “The Japanese Bath: Extraordinarily Ordinary”, in Joseph Jay Tobin, editor, Re-made in Japan: Everyday Life and Consumer...

Origin of skinship

Phono-semantic matching of Japanese スキンシップ (sukinshippu), itself a wasei eigo (和製英語; pseudo-anglicism) derived from English skin + -ship, or as a blend from English skin + kinship. It is first recorded in English in 1966 according to the OED. In Japanese, this form was also observed in the Latin script as early as 1955.

Questions about skinship

What does skinship mean?
Skinship means bonding through physical (touch, skin-to-skin) contact; particularly between family members, relatives and loved ones.
What is skinship in Thai?
Skinship in Thai is สกินชิพ (sà-gin-chíp). See Skinship meaning in Thai.
How do you use skinship in a sentence?
However, there were times that folks needed that skinship to feel hearten'd and Dan often felt when others had that need.
What part of speech is skinship?
Skinship is a noun.
How do you pronounce skinship?
Skinship is pronounced /ˈskɪnʃɪp/.

Words near skinship in the dictionary

  1. skins someone alive
  2. skins the cat
  3. skins the lamb
  4. skins up
  5. skinsful
  6. skinship
  7. skinsuit
  8. skinsuited
  9. skinsuits
  10. skint
  11. skintag

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: skinship (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-skinship.wav.

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