A quantity ofyarn,thread, etc. put up together in anoblong shape, after it is taken from thereel. A skein of cotton yarn is formed by eighty turns of the thread around a fifty-four inch reel.
“How horribly unjust of you!” cried Lord Henry, tilting his hat back and looking up at the little clouds that, like ravelledskeins of glossy white silk, were drifting across the hollowed turquoise of the summer sky.
The embroidery, which was a matter for thought, the design being difficult and the colours wanting consideration, brought lapses into the dialogue when she seemed to be engrossed in herskeins of silk, or, with head a little drawn back and eyes narrowed, considered the effect of the whole.
“He did have a beard, sir,” replied Dorcas, smiling. “And well I know it, for he borrowed twoskeins of my black wool to make it with! And I’m sure it looked wonderfully natural at a distance.”
But when she turned her thoughts to Morningside Park she perceived the tangledskein of life was now to be further complicated by his romantic importunity.
The practical application of what I have said is very close to the problem which I am investigating. It is a tangledskein, you understand, and I am looking for a loose end.
But then, science is a complexskein, intricately interknotted across the artificial boundaries we draw only that we may the more easily encompass its parts in our mind. Pick up any thread of thatskein and the whole structure will follow.
2005,Tony Judt, “The Social Democratic Moment”, inPostwar: A history of Europe since 1945, London: Vintage Books, published2010,→ISBN:
Then, beginning in 1959, theskein of convention began to unravel.
2018, Laurence Rose,The Long Spring, Bloomsbury,→ISBN,page111:
High above the swallows and 2 miles or so out into the Channel was askein of geese, probably brent geese on the first day of their emigration from the estuaries of the Channel coast towards the high Arctic tundra of Spitsbergen or Russia.
2019 June 6, “A gaggle, a confusion and a conspiracy - bizarre animal collective group names”, inBBC[2]:
They're only referred to as a gaggle when they're on land. When they're flying in formation they can be referred to as askein.
