skelter meaning: definition, etymology and quotations

skelter

noun

Etymology Compare helter-skelter.

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.

verb

Etymology Compare helter-skelter.

Colloquial, With "away" or "off" To run off helter-skelter; to hurry; to scurry.

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: