skittish.
Easily scared or startled; timid.
Meaning & usage
Easily scared or startled; timid.
The dog likes people he knows, but he is skittish around strangers.
Wanton; changeable; fickle.
Difficult to manage; tricky.
Where this word comes from
Probably from skite (“to move lightly and hurriedly; to move suddenly, particularly in an oblique direction (Scotland, Northern England)”) + -ish; compare skitter.
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.