skel-mn̥-
“dried body, skeleton”skeleton, skeletal
Nominal of *skel- giving Greek skeletos, English skeleton, skeletal.
Discussion
The form *skel-mn̥- is a nominal derivative built on *skel- "to dry out, to parch, to cut," and its meaning — "a dried body" — survives most visibly in Greek skeletos "dried up, parched," the adjective that became English skeleton. Pokorny (IEW 923–927) reconstructs the base root with a broad semantic range encompassing cutting, splitting, and desiccation, all united by the concept of removing moisture from organic matter.The Greek form is decisive. Skeletos was originally an adjective applied to sōma "body" in the phrase sōma skeleton "a dried body" — the term used by anatomists and embalmers for a desiccated corpse. Over time the adjective was substantivized: the "dried thing" became simply "the skeleton," the bony framework revealed when flesh is stripped or withered away. Beekes (EDG, s.v. σκέλλω) connects it firmly to the verb skellō "I dry, I parch," with the mn-suffix forming the characteristic result-noun: that which has undergone drying.Beyond Greek, the root *skel- produced a wide family of cutting and drying words. English skill likely descends through Old Norse from a related sense of "cutting, discernment" — the ability to cut to the heart of a matter. The semantic bridge between "to dry" and "to cut" is the shared observation that cut surfaces dry, and dried things crack and split. Watkins (AHDIER, s.v. *skel-) treats these as a unified field. The anatomical specificity of *skel-mn̥- is notable among PIE derivatives: it names not an action or quality but a physical object, the desiccated remnant of a living body, preserved in modern English almost unchanged from its Greek intermediary.