0 a person, in the past a female servant, who does the dirty and unpleasant jobs in a house, such as cleaning:
He treats me like a skivvy.
1 a tight-fitting piece of clothing for the top part of the body, made of knitted cotton, with a high, round collar
2 to do the dirty, unpleasant jobs in the house:
I'm not going to skivvy for you any more.
Even the enterprise allowance scheme is described as a skivvy scheme.
They are now skivvies if not navvies in the hospitals.
The officer's batman and the soldier "skivvy" to the officer's wife ought to be things of the past.
They were kept in a cellar, not properly fed and used as skivvies.
We are not part of the unfortunate skivvy world of third-world nations.
The taxpayer would then not have to find the £2 billion now needed for the skivvy youth training and community programme schemes.
Now the kitchen maid has disappeared from the upper middle class—the lower middle class only had "skivvies"—and the upper middle class is therefore very much hurt.
It is a skivvy scheme.
