Noun: skittle
| Singular | skittle |
| Plural | skittles |
Sample Sentences
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By the afternoon it seemed as if the storm had passed and that frost was setting in; but in the evening the wind rose to gale force, bringing telegraph poles down like skittles and tangling power and telephone lines. [1960 March, “The January blizzard in the North-East of Scotland”, in Trains Illustrated, page 137:]
Nouns inflected like skittle
soldier's woundwort,
Nicosian,
whopper,
greypate,
tactile sign language,
chronotrope,
Rosie Lee,
dissentient,
photoinactivator,
sulphonediimine,
coastal waterfall,
residuary devise,
bituminization,
nitrosonaphthol,
smṛiti,
geosphere,
backscreen,
mensuralist,
flocculate,
flocculant, etc. (List truncated at 20 nouns)
Etymology
Origin unknown. Perhaps of North Germanic origin, from Old Norse skutill (“bolt, harpoon”), related to skjóta (“to shoot”), but the OED dismisses this connection as conjecture. The Old Norse word is related to Swedish and Danish skyttel (“shuttle, child's toy”). Compare also Old English sċytel (“a dart, bolt”). More at shuttle. See: Old Norse Nouns '
skutill', Danish Nouns '
skyttel', Old English Nouns '
sċytel'.