means To glide smoothly over a surface on blades or wheels strapped to your feet — or, figuratively, to slide past difficulty with effortless, sometimes lucky, ease.

from From the Dutch 'schaats,' meaning a skate or stilt, which itself came from Old North French 'escache' (a stilt or trestle) — likely a cousin of words for 'leg' and 'support.' Dutch settlers and traders brought both the contraption and the word to English speakers, and curiously the Dutch 'schaats' was already a singular form that English ears mistook for a plural, then trimmed back to a single 'skate.' The slippery fish called a skate is unrelated, arriving instead from the Old Norse 'skata.'