skinhead

noun

skin·​head ˈskin-ˌhed How to pronounce skinhead (audio)
1
: a person whose hair is cut very short
2
: a usually white male belonging to any of various sometimes violent youth gangs whose members have close-shaven hair and often espouse white-supremacist beliefs

Examples of skinhead in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web Enter Beau Bridges, playing a sheriff who’s been teleported into the movie from reruns of either The Dukes of Hazzard or Smokey and the Bandit, and who joins a collection of unsavory locals that also includes a meth-head (Tabatha Shaun) and a skinhead (Keith Jardine). Jordan Mintzer, The Hollywood Reporter, 8 Sep. 2022 Lowery relays the 2012 massacre at a Sikh temple, in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, in which Wade Michael Page, a forty-year-old skinhead who was active in the neo-Nazi music scene, fatally shot six people and wounded four others, in part, through the eyes of a pair of radicalism researchers. Benjamin Wallace-Wells, The New Yorker, 29 Aug. 2023 Her skinhead and powerful voice drew immediate attention. Nardine Saad, Los Angeles Times, 26 July 2023 The movie makes the point that the regulars at the Old Oak aren’t white-supremacist skinheads. Owen Gleiberman, Variety, 26 May 2023 For Lauren Manning, a former Canadian skinhead, the murder of a friend named Jan and the suicide of another friend, Tim, underscored her growing dissatisfaction with misogyny in the movement. Laurie Udesky, USA TODAY, 6 May 2023 These include neo-Nazi, pro-Confederacy, racist skinhead organizations, and white nationalist organizations, including the Ku Klux Klan, the Patriot Front, Proud Boys, Stormfront and the National Justice Party. Laurie Udesky, USA TODAY, 6 May 2023 Since his breakthrough performance as an Australian skinhead in Geoffrey Wright’s Romper Stomper in 1992, Crowe has been unavoidable on the global film scene. Scott Roxborough, The Hollywood Reporter, 5 May 2023 The modern-day anti-fascist movement in the United States, including antifa, grew out of the Anti-Racist Action Network, a decentralized activist movement resisting racist skinhead subcultures and public demonstrations by neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klan organizations in the 1980s and 1990s. Stanislav Vysotsky, The Conversation, 9 June 2020 See More

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'skinhead.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

First Known Use

1943, in the meaning defined at sense 1

Time Traveler
The first known use of skinhead was in 1943

Dictionary Entries Near skinhead

Cite this Entry

“Skinhead.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/skinhead. Accessed 30 Nov. 2023.

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