From Old Norse 'skinn' (animal hide, skin, pelt), entering Middle English around 1200 CE during the period of intense Norse-English contact in the Danelaw. The Norse word gradually displaced the native Old English 'hyd' (hide, skin) in everyday usage — 'hyd' survived but narrowed to mean the cured leather hide of an animal, while 'skinn' expanded to cover the outer covering of any living body. Old Norse 'skinn' connects to Proto-Germanic *skinnaz (skin, hide), derived from PIE *sek- (to cut) — the skin conceived as what
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The initial /sk-/ sound in 'skin' is a dead giveaway of its Norse origin — the native Old English word for the same concept was 'hȳd,' which survives as 'hide.' English ended up with both words, splitting the meaning: 'skin' for living bodies, 'hide' for dead animals.
of Job 19:20). The word's Norse origin is invisible in everyday speech; it has been fully absorbed into the core English vocabulary over eight centuries, its Scandinavian source forgotten. Key roots: *sek- (Proto-Indo-European: "to cut (skin as something cut or peeled off)").