1885 Daily News 1 Dec. 2/1 The milk is manufactured into butter and cheese,..and the ‘skim’..is not exactly the most nourishing stuff in the world.

1886 All Year Round 14 Aug. 34 But there is skim and skim, just as there is butter-milk and butter-milk.

1895 Westm. Gaz. 30 Dec. 3/1 The owners of pictures are in the habit of proffering a certain proportion of skim with their cream.

1938 W. Faulkner Unvanquished 211 It lay with its body on the land and its head fixed in the skim ice like it was set into a mirror.

1974 J. Keats Of Time & Island v. 74 You can see them [sc. fish] lying under skim ice in the shallows in the spring.

1965 P. L. Dixon Compl. Bk. Surfing 143 Riding a skim board is simple to define, difficult to accomplish.

1972 National Geographic Nov. 688 Riding a skim~board, a youth glides over a comber-laved beach.

1973 W. McCarthy Detail iii. 144 They used her as a courier for skim money.

a1884 E. H. Knight Pract. Dict. Mech. Suppl. 820/2 Skim Net (Fishing), a large dipping net.

1887 G. B. Goode Fisheries U.S. 802 Prior to 1872, shrimp were taken in this locality only with skim-nets.

1891 C. L. Morgan Animal Sketches 135 An efficient skim-net, wherewith to capture insects on the wing.

1807 A. Young Gen. View Agric. Essex I. v. 137 The skim-plough of the late Mr. Ducket,..and other skim coulters.

1837 Brit. Husbandry (Libr. Useful Knowl.) II. 17 Trench and skim ploughs.

1844 H. Stephens Bk. of Farm III. 765 The land has been recently skim-ploughed.

1951 W. Faulkner Requiem for Nun 227 That same white tide sweeping them in: that tender skim covering the winter's brown earth, burgeoning through spring and summer into September's white surf.

1962 M. E. Murie Two in Far North ii. viii. 178 There was only a light skim of snow as yet.

1966 D. Bagley Wyatt's Hurricane ix. 259 Then, a few miles further on, they ran into water on the road, just a skim at first, but deepening to over six inches.

1979 M. McMullen But Nellie was so Nice I. i. 12 She put on a light skim of makeup..and left the apartment gratefully.

1989 Independent 10 Aug. 6/5 The trick of adding a skim of asphalt—bitumen and stone—to provide a running surface was not invented until 1901.

1972 T. P. McMahon Issue of Bishop's Blood xiii. 152 The take in Las Vegas is on the order of eight and a half millions a week. A good chunk of that dough, the skim, goes through Gentilli's hands.

1982 Washington Post 12 Oct. a8/2 One method of obtaining this money is..to buy casinos in Nevada using front men and then insert their own personnel to effect a skim.

1984 N.Y. Times 28 Jan. i. 9/4 Cash equivalent to the spurious ‘fill’ slips was removed from the casino cashier's cage, the books were balanced and the skim was complete.

1986 T. Barling Smoke xvii. 396 OK. But we get the whole skim from the London casinos.

1794 Darke in Marshall Rev. (1810) II. 373 Where they make the skim cheese, the land is deemed too rich for one meal.

1866 Intellectual Observer No. 56. 126 Milk scant and skim.

1893 Daily News 25 Dec. 5/5 Then the problem of branding skim cheese will be solved.

1980 Amer. Banker 17 Sept. 10/1 Information on how to produce fraudulent credit cards or skim data from magnetic tape on cards was being circulated freely in prisons.

1984 Business Week (Nexis) 15 Oct. 105 Add other forms of credit card fraud—such as ‘skimming’ information from a valid card's magnetic strip and rerecording it on another card, as can easily be done with a $30 handheld device—and losses probably hit $150 million last year.

2003 Business Rev. Weekly 14 Aug. 24/1 A gang that skimmed cards at 14 ATMs in Sydney and Melbourne last November, stealing more than $500,000 from the accounts of 500 victims.