skerry means A small rocky island which may be covered by the sea at high tide or during storms.
skerry is pronounced /ˈskɛɹi/.
Why “skerry” is a great word
A small, rocky island or reef, often one that is submerged at high tide or during storms. From dialectal Scots (Shetlandic and Orcadian) skerry, from Old Norse sker ("rock or reef in the sea"), from Proto-Germanic *skarjam, ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European root *(s)ker- ("to cut"). First attested in English in a Scottish context in the early 17th century (c. 1605–15). Unlike "islet," which suggests a stable, vegetated micro-land, or "reef," which names a broader, submerged hazard, a skerry is a singular, stark punctuation mark in the maritime sentence. It is the dark, slick hump that breaks the swell at low water, the sudden white explosion of spray against black stone in a gale, and the forlorn perch for a cormorant's drying wings—a monument not to permanence, but to the ocean's patient work of reduction.
Etymology
From dialectal Scots (Shetlandic and Orcadian) skerry, from Old Norse sker (whence Danish skær and Norwegian Bokmål skjær). Ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *(s)ker-.
noun
- A small rocky island which may be covered by the sea at high tide or during storms.
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
Words closest in meaning
By meaning, not spelling — each word's AI semantic fingerprint, nearest first.