skin [OE] Old Norse gave us skin in the later Old English period—the word used until then was *hide. The expression by the skin of your teeth [M16th] arose from a misquotation from the biblical book of Job: ‘I am escaped with the skin of my teeth.’ The implication is ‘and nothing else’. See also beauty. The skinhead is associated with the Britain of the 1970s, but the first skinheads were American. In the 1950s recruits to the US Marines were known as skinheads because of the severe way their hair was cropped when they joined up. The colloquial word skint first found in the 1920s is a variant of colloquial skinned used in the same sense.