The skin or pelt of a zebra; (also) a striped design or motif resembling this; frequently attributive.
1774
Zebra wood..is of a most lovely tint, and richly veined; but not in lifts like the pigeon wood: the latter much better corresponds with the zebra skin in the disposition of its stripes.
E. Long, History of Jamaicavol. III. 838
1886
I had no shoes but those of my own manufacture, made of zebra skin.
Proceedings of Royal Geographical Societyvol. 8 76
1927
For the motorist a la mode who likes black and white, one furrier is showing a genuine zebra skin coat.
Amarillo (Texas) Daily News 31 August 7/1
1973
Walls, floor, and ceiling were all done in a zebra-skin motif. Everything..was covered in zebra skin.
G. Beare, Snake on Grave xiii. 68
2013
Today the drums have changed—they are no longer made of zebra skin.
zebra skin typically occurs about 0.01 times per million words in modern written English.
zebra skin is in frequency band 3, which contains words occurring between 0.01 and 0.1 times per million words in modern written English. More about OED's frequency bands
Frequency data is computed programmatically, and should be regarded as an estimate.
Frequency of zebra skin, n., 1770–2010
* Occurrences per million words in written English
Historical frequency series are derived from Google Books Ngrams (version 2), a data set based on the Google Books corpus of several million books printed in English between 1500 and 2010.
The overall frequency for a given word is calculated by summing frequencies for the main form of the word, any plural or inflected forms, and any major spelling variations.
For sets of homographs (distinct entries that share the same word-form, e.g. mole, n.¹, mole, n.², mole, n.³, etc.), we have estimated the frequency of each homograph entry as a fraction of the total Ngrams frequency for the word-form. This may result in inaccuracies.
Smoothing has been applied to series for lower-frequency words, using a moving-average algorithm. This reduces short-term fluctuations, which may be produced by variability in the content of the Google Books corpus.
Decade
Frequency per million words
1770
0.0046
1780
0.0038
1790
0.0036
1800
0.0031
1810
0.0012
1820
0.0013
1830
0.0014
1840
0.0013
1850
0.0015
1860
0.0019
1870
0.0022
1880
0.0029
1890
0.0032
1900
0.0042
1910
0.0047
1920
0.0057
1930
0.0062
1940
0.0072
1950
0.008
1960
0.0089
1970
0.0098
1980
0.011
1990
0.011
2000
0.011
2010
0.012
Originally published as part of the entry for zebra, n.