Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- intransitive verb To leave hastily; flee.
from The Century Dictionary.
- To spill; scatter.
- To betake one's self hastily to flight; run away; scamper off, as through fear or in panic.
- noun A hasty, disorderly flight.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- intransitive verb Slang, U. S. To betake one's self to flight, as if in a panic; to flee; to run away.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- verb To move or
run away quickly.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- verb run away, as if in a panic
- noun a hasty flight
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
Support
Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word skedaddle.
Examples
-
And since, in his fright, he didn't "skedaddle" fast enough to suit them, they threw beets and all sorts of vegetables at him, vegetables that had been ripe a very long time.
Half-Past Seven Stories Robert Gordon Anderson
-
That famous "skedaddle," as it was the fashion to call it, he frankly admitted, in his official report, began among the men of his brigade, and the "disorderly retreat" speedily became a humiliating rout, which only a few cool-headed officers, such as
-
* It may be interesting to note here that in all probability the word "skedaddle," about which there was some controversy during the war, came from the Virginia negro's use of "skaddle," which is a corruption of "scatter."
Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings: The Folk-Lore of the Old Plantation. By Joel Chandler Harris. With Illustrations by Frederick S. Church and James H. Moser Frederick Stuart 1881
-
* 1 It may he interesting to note here that in all probability the word "skedaddle," about which there was some controversy during the war, came from the Virginia negro's use of "skaddle," which is a corruption of "scatter."
Uncle Remus, his songs and his sayings Joel Chandler Harris 1878
-
Milroy's "skedaddle" was even more disgraceful than that of Banks.
-
Their thanks was to kill both him and his dog and then skedaddle back to Mexico, which refuses to hand over murderers to the US until we promise not to mete out the same punishment to them that they meted out to their victims.
-
The ones I've seen give you a good once over, and skedaddle.
-
The ones I've seen give you a good once over, and skedaddle.
-
The family live a shiftless existence, ‘doing the skedaddle’ from place to place when the bills mount up, sleeping in cardboard boxes and finding their best food source in dustbin leftovers.
-
That should have been Schiller's and Liley's cue to skedaddle.
dontcry commented on the word skedaddle
I say it like this "skeee-daddle!"
June 23, 2008