The story
- Tagalog · semantic loan fromiskuwater
- English todaysquammy
From squamous + -y, where -ous was elided to extract the root. The reduplicated ⟨m⟩ is akin to runny, brimmy, etc. The Philippine slang sense is a semantic loan from Tagalog iskuwater, itself from Philippine English squatter (“poor vagrant; illegal informal settler”) due to resemblance of the first syllable. Compare Tagalog iskuwami.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.