Skip: From jumping to hauling ore

In everyday speech, to skip is to move lightly and quickly, bouncing from one foot to the next, or to jump over something entirely. A child skips rope. You skip a chapter in a book. The word evokes lightness and nimbleness.

In mining, a skip is a large, rigid container, usually made of steel, that carries ore, waste rock, or mullock up and down the shaft of a mine. It is attached to a cable or chain and hoisted by a winding engine at the surface. The skip is emptied at the top of the shaft by tipping or unlatching its sides. A single skip may hold several tons. The work of loading, operating, and maintaining the skip falls to the skipman, who positions the container at the mine bottom and signals to the winding operator above.

The skip is essential to the vertical transport of broken rock in deep mines. Because the shaft is the main artery of the mine, the skip's reliability and the skipman's skill directly affect the rate of extraction. Poorly loaded skips jam or swing dangerously; badly timed signals cause collisions and damage. The skip is a functional descendant of the bucket and pulley, adapted to the demands of industrial mining.

The word likely came into mining speech from the older sense of skip as a bucket or container. In some contexts it meant a wooden pail or vessel. The shift from a small wooden bucket to a large steel hoisting container happened gradually as mines grew deeper and production demands increased. By the 19th century, skip was the standard term in British and colonial mines. The light, bouncing sense of the word remained in everyday English, while the industrial sense became fixed to ore transport.