What the heck does “skell” mean?
“NYPD Blue” makes use of a lot of official and unofficial cop lingo. There’s a semi-complete dictionary as part of the larger version of the FAQ, but since the question of “skell” pops up a lot, here are two definitions: Skell: Short-hand for “skeleton”; i.e., what most drug-users wind up looking like. A derogatory term used to describe low-life junkies. Also refers to homeless vagrants. (From the book “The City in Slang, New York Life and Popular Speech,” by Irving Lewis Allen (1993): The New York police today call the most vagrant of the male homeless skells. William Safire informs us that “it is a shortening of skellum meaning a rascal or thief, akin to a skelder, ‘to beg on the streets,’ first used in print by Ben Johnson in 1599, just after the playwright got out of jail for killing a man in a duel; it is possible he picked up the word from cellmate’s argot.” The word popped up about 1935 in the short form skell, suggesting that skellum/skell had underground oral use for centuries
