- 1
To skitter is to move very quickly and lightly, usually with lots of little steps, the way a mouse runs across a kitchen floor or a small crab runs over wet sand. The movement feels a bit darting — not a calm walk, and not a heavy run. Insects skitter on a pond. Dry leaves skitter down an empty street in the wind. People can skitter too, but the word quietly compares them to a small animal: a child might skitter down a hallway and be gone. You will see it more in stories than in everyday talk. There is a noun as well (a skitter, or a skittering), taken from the verb, for that light rushing movement.
輕快地掠過、一溜煙跑過（多用來形容小動物或被風吹的輕東西）
組成Possibly a frequentative of dialect skite, “to move lightly and hurriedly,” or to dart off at an angle. Frequentative here means the action comes in little repeated bursts. The noun comes from the verb.
原始詞典資料7 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
skitterverb詞源 1/ˈskɪtə(ɹ)/
- 1
To move hurriedly or as by bouncing or twitching; to scamper, to scurry; to scuttle.
- I opened the cabinet and a number of cockroaches went skittering off into the darkness.
- Some kinds of ducks in lighting strike the water with their tails first, and skitter along the surface for a few feet before settling down.
- 2
To make a scratching or scuttling noise while, or as if, skittering.
- Both "Dark Snow" and "Aurelia" [by AFI] feature subtle washes of brittle piano à la Decemberunderground, while "She Speaks The Language" boasts a skittering electronic underbelly, and eerie synths are suspended like low clouds in "Above The Bridge."
- 3
To move or pass (something) over a surface quickly so that it touches only at intervals; to skip, to skite.
- "Skittering," continued the Professor, "is practiced with a strong line about the length of the rod, to which is affixed a small trolling-spoon, a minnow, or a piece of pork-rind cut in the rude semblance of a small fish. The boat is poled along, as in ‘bobbing,’ but farther out in the stream, when the angler, standing in the bow, ‘skitters’ or skips the spoon or bait over the surface just at the edge of the weeds.
skitternoun詞源 1/ˈskɪtə(ɹ)/
- 1
A skittering movement.
- A skitter of activity. A skitter of gooseflesh.
- I had seen an aerial helix of raptors, hawks and harriers riding a thermal, and below them a skitter of ringed plover and other waders, together with more kingfishers than I had ever seen before.
skitterverb詞源 2/ˈskɪtə(ɹ)/
- 1
To cause to have diarrhea.
- "[…] I'd like you to give the calves two heaped tablespoonfuls [of Epsom salts] three times a day." / "Oh 'ell, you'll skitter the poor buggers to death!" / "Maybe so, but there's nothing else for it," I said.
- 2
To suffer from a bout of diarrhea; to produce thin excrement.
- As a symptomatic phenomenon, Diarrhœa is skittering, i.e., the discharges are composed of water, intermingled with particles of imperfectly digested food; from two to six or eight discharges may thus take place, and it is an invariable precursor of constipation.
- And when health problems struck, as they inevitably would, no matter how attentive the farmer, the tree had to be nursed until it was better. […] Jeez, and I'd thought mothering week-old orphan calves back in Scotland had been a headache! Still, at least a tree couldn't skitter diarrhoea down the front of your jeans, or bellow to be bucket-fed warm milk in the middle of the night, so that was a bonus.
skitternoun詞源 2/ˈskɪtə(ɹ)/
- 1
Often skitters: the condition of suffering from diarrhea; thin excrement.
- I can't give it my immediate attention, as the cow has the skitter (diarrhoea) and I'm waiting on the Vit (vet).
- Shaking but making herself stand there while skitter ran down the inside of her legs. She learnt German early from Anna. Durchfall easier to spell than Diarrhoea. Falling liquid brown.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。