Meanings
plural skelters
- A gravity-based device used to store and rotate round food and drink in a first-in-first-out manner.
After collecting them each day from the chicken coop, she put the eggs in her skelter until she needed them.
present singular third person skelters · participle present skeltering · participle past skeltered · past skeltered
- colloquialTo run off helter-skelter; to hurry; to scurry.
1 more example
It was evident that Europeans seldom came here, for numbers of women skeltered away as I walked through the village and one girl about ten or twelve years old, who had just brought a bamboo full of water from the river, threw it down with a cry of horror and alarm the moment she caught sight of me, turned around and jumped into the stream.
1869, Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, volume I, London: Macmillan and Co., page 102
Origin
Translations
German eilen, hasten
- eilenhurry, scurry
- hastenhurry, scurry
Rhymes & wordplay
Anagrams
Cite this entry
skelter. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/skelter
“skelter.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/skelter. Accessed November 3, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “skelter,” accessed November 3, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/skelter.
Source: skelter on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.