Cringe

How to spell cringe

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce cringe

What does cringe mean?

1. verbTo recoil or shrink back, often out of embarrassment, fear, or distaste.
2. nounA feeling or moment of acute embarrassment or recoiling discomfort.
3. adjectiveInformally, so awkward or embarrassing that it makes onlookers uncomfortable.

Cringe in a sentence

• verb

  I still cringe whenever i remember that typo in the company email.

• noun

  The old holiday photos gave her a real cringe when she found them.

• adjective

  The team's promotional video was deeply cringe and nobody wanted to share it.

• verb

  The dog would cringe at the sound of fireworks every summer.

• noun

  There was a collective cringe in the office when the boss mispronounced the client's name.

• adjective

  His attempt to use teenage slang in the meeting felt completely cringe.

Where does cringe come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Cringe descends from the Old English verb cringan, sometimes spelled crincan, which meant 'to bend, to yield, or to fall in battle'; the core image was of a body buckling or curling up. It belongs to a family of Germanic words, and it is closely related to the same root that gives us 'crank' and the notion of something bent or twisted. By the Middle English period the meaning had narrowed from physical bending to the cowering, shrinking motion a person makes out of fear or servility. From there it shifted again toward an inner sense of acute embarrassment, so that a modern speaker can cringe without moving a muscle. The silent run of letters 'inge' that ends the word is the usual English way of writing a soft 'j' sound after a short vowel, which is why it shares its ending with 'fringe', 'hinge', and 'twinge'.

How the word is built

• cringe (whole word, from Old English cringan: to bend or give way)