skedaddle
Other forms: skedaddled; skedaddling; skedaddles
When you skedaddle, you leave very suddenly. A kid who breaks a window with her baseball might decide to skedaddle before her neighbor comes home from work.
You might decide to skedaddle from your aunt's party before she starts showing the slides from her vacation ten years ago, or skedaddle from the town swimming pool when it starts to rain. In either case, you're getting out of there, and fast. Skedaddle is American Civil War military slang, dating from about 1861 — experts aren't sure what its roots are.
-
run away, as if in a panictype of:break away, bunk, escape, fly the coop, head for the hills, hightail it, lam, run, run away, scarper, scat, take to the woods, turn tailflee; take to one's heels; cut and run
-
a hasty flight
- MLA
- APA
- Chicago
Vocabulary lists containing skedaddle
Ben Zimmer is the executive producer of Vocabulary.com and the Visual Thesaurus. He is language columnist for The Boston Globe and the former "On Language" columnist for The New York Times Magazine. He has worked as editor for American dictionaries at Oxford University Press and as a consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary. He is also the chair of the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Society. We asked Ben, as an expert on the history of American English, to give us some of his favorite words that originated in the United States. "I'm fascinated by how the English language developed a unique American flavor (not flavour!) beginning in colonial times. I've been collecting examples of great contributions from American English. Here is a cornucopia of copacetic coinages from fertile American minds."
After the Communist revolution in Cuba, fourteen-year-old Lucía Álvarez and her brother are sent to the United States to make a new life in Nebraska.
Join the chorus and experience the world of competitive a cappella singing with these quotes from "Pitch Perfect." You'll see it's been praised as one of the funniest films of recent years, but if you start beat boxing and singing all the time and annoying your friends, don't blame us; that's on you!