On the sporting fields of New Zealand cities like Auckland and Wellington in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the slightly-too-cool kids were jokingly described with one word: “skux.” To be skux was to be popular, good-looking and also possibly a little bit conceited — ultimately it was a compliment.
The word, which has somewhat fallen out of use in the intervening years, popped back up on social media this week in tributes following the death of the actor Sam Neill. While it may seem a random jumble of letters, in New Zealand, it is a term of endearment and affection.
As with the origin stories of most slang terms, tracing the roots of “skux” is difficult, but the most common theory is that it emerged, as most good things do, by chance, in the New Zealand capital, Wellington.
The New Zealand writer Madeleine Chapman traced the word’s etymology for The Spinoff website. She found that “skux” was predominantly used by men in New Zealand’s Pacific communities in the late 1990s and early 2000s to refer to other men they thought were cool but vain.
“It was a little bit sort of mocking a person for putting that much effort into their appearance, but at the same time, you couldn’t be a skux unless you also looked good,” Ms. Chapman said in an interview. » | Laura Chung | Reporting from Sydney, Australia | Saturday, July 18, 2026
