Skein

Skein may refer to:

• A traditional English collective noun for a flock of wildfowl such as ducks, geese, or swans in flight
• A wound ball of yarn with a center-pull strand: see hank
• A metal sleeve fitted over the end of a wagon axle, to which the wheel is mounted
• Skein dubh or sgian-dubh, a Scottish knife
• Skein (unit), a unit of length used by weavers and tailors

Fiction

• Skein (character), a Marvel Comics supervillain
• The Tangled Skein, a novel by Baroness Orczy
• With a Tangled Skein, a novel by Piers Anthony

Mathematics

• Skein (graph theory), a subgraph of a graph formed by paths connecting a given pair of vertices
• Skein (hash function), a cryptographic hash function submitted to the NIST competition
• Skein module, a mathematical structure used in knot theory
• Skein relation, a key identity used to define knot polynomials

See also

• Skien (disambiguation)