Word.ws English Dictionary

sugar skull

sugar skull noun: a brightly colored skull face icon, placed on the grave of the deceased to celebrate their life during festivals and feast days.

sugar skull: a brightly colored skull face icon, placed on the grave of the deceased to celebrate their life...
Image: CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

sugar skull (plural sugar skulls)

  1. (Mexico) A brightly colored skull face icon, placed on the grave of the deceased to celebrate their life during festivals and feast days.
    Synonyms:
    calavera
  2. A more modern design of the same style, often done as a tattoo, and normally darker in colour and more macabre.

Synonyms of sugar skull

Forms of sugar skull

pluralsugar skulls

Origin of sugar skull

From the use of clay-molded sugar in their preparation.

Questions about sugar skull

What does sugar skull mean?
Sugar skull means a brightly colored skull face icon, placed on the grave of the deceased to celebrate their life during festivals and feast days.
What part of speech is sugar skull?
Sugar skull is a noun.
What is the plural of sugar skull?
The plural of sugar skull is sugar skulls.

Words near sugar skull in the dictionary

  1. sugar scoops
  2. sugar shack
  3. sugar shacks
  4. sugar shanty
  5. sugar sickness
  6. sugar skull
  7. sugar skulls
  8. sugar snap pea
  9. sugar snap peas
  10. sugar soap
  11. sugar soaps

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: sugar skull (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: “sugar skull.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sugar_skull. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.