Scranny

Part of speech: adjective

Definitions

1. Unusually thin and bony, with a scrawny, underfed look to the body or frame
2. Describing a person or animal that is lean to the point of looking skinny and undernourished
3. Having a meagre, skeletal appearance, as though too thin and lacking flesh

Etymology: Scranny is a dialect word meaning thin, meagre or scraggy, and its roots reach back to an old idea of drying out. Old English had "scrinian", meaning "to dry", and the same root appears in the family of words that gave English "scrawny" and "scrannel". Scranny belongs to the same cluster of thin, dry, wasted-looking words. The word may have been borrowed from a North Germanic language, since its close relatives are found in Scandinavian dialects. Swedish has "skranig", "skral" and "skran", and Norwegian and Danish have forms with the same sense of scrawny, poor or barren. Behind these lies an Old Norse base, probably "skrindr", meaning thin or emaciated, which is reflected in Old Swedish "skrinder". Scranny has the same root as "scrinian" and the Scandinavian forms, so the words are best seen as relatives sharing one ancient stem. A distant possible cousin is the Breton "krina", meaning to dry, which hints at how widely this sense of withering was spread across the languages of northwestern Europe.