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skein

Pronunciation: /skeɪn/

The English word “skein” has 11 meanings listed here.

noun

  1. A quantity of thread, yarn, etc., wound on a reel then removed and loosely knotted into an oblong shape; a skein of cotton is formed by eighty turns of thread around a reel with a fifty-four inch diameter.
  2. The membrane of a fish ovary.
  3. A group of wildfowl (for example, geese or swans) in flight.
  4. Synonym of spireme (“the tangled mass of strands of chromatin seen in the early stages of mitosis, originally believed to be a single continuous strand (or two in a diploid cell, etc.)”).
  5. A tangle, a weave, a web.
  6. A winning streak.
  7. A series created by a web (“major broadcasting network”).
  8. A thin strip of an osier (“long, pliable twig from a plant, usually a willow”) used in basketmaking.
  9. A metallic strengthening band or thimble on the wooden arm of an axle of a wagon.

verb

  1. To weave or wind (thread, yarn, etc.) into a skein (noun etymology 1, noun sense 1).
  2. To intertwine or weave (something) with another thing.

Etymology

The noun is derived from Middle English skaine, skayne (“quantity of string, thread, etc., wound on a reel; the string, thread, etc., so wound”), from Old French escaigne (modern French écagne, écaigne (Picardy)); further etymology uncertain, probably from Proto-Celtic, from Proto-Indo-European *skend- (“to split off”). The verb is derived from noun. cognates * Irish scáinne (“skein, clew”)

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Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.