1 the structure of bones that supports the body of a person or an animal; a model of this structure:
The human skeleton consists of 206 bones. * a dinosaur skeleton
2 (informal) a very thin person or animal:
The disease has reduced her to a skeleton.
3 [C,usually sing.] the main structure that supports a building, etc:
Only the concrete skeleton of the factory remained.
4 [C,usually sing.] the basic outline of a plan, piece of writing, etc. to which more details can be added later:
Examples were used to flesh out the skeleton of the argument.
5 ~ staff, crew, etc. the smallest number of people, etc. that you need to do sth:
There will only be a skeleton staff on duty over the holiday. * We managed to operate a skeleton bus service during the strike.
IDIOMS
a skeleton in the cupboard (BrE) (also a skeleton in the closet AmE, BrE) (informal) something shocking, embarrassing, etc. that has happened to you or your family in the past that you want to keep secret
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About this entry
This is a English–English dictionary entry.
Sourced from Main Dictionary in Lughet's collection.
This word also appears under other sources in Lughet's collection — see the list below.
This entry for skeleton is sourced from Main Dictionary, one of the dictionaries and corpora merged into Lughet.
Is skeleton a noun, verb, or something else?
In this entry, skeleton is tagged as noun.
Does skeleton appear elsewhere on Lughet?
Yes — skeleton appears under other sources or language pairs in Lughet's collection. See the list below.
What is Lughet?
Lughet is a free trilingual dictionary covering nearly five million entries across Uyghur, Chinese, and English, drawn from more than ten source dictionaries and corpora.
