Crush

How to spell crush

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce crush

What does crush mean?

1. verbTo press or squeeze something with enough force to break, damage, or flatten it.
2. nounA strong but usually brief romantic attraction to someone.
3. nounA dense, tightly packed crowd of people.

Crush in a sentence

• verb

  The heavy box can crush anything stored beneath it.

• noun

  She admitted to having a harmless crush on a colleague years ago.

• noun

  The crush at the station entrance made it hard to move.

• verb

  A single misstep could crush the delicate seedlings in the tray.

• noun

  His teenage crush faded once they started working together.

• noun

  They lost sight of each other in the crush near the stage.

Where does crush come from?

Language of origin: French

Crush entered English in the late 1300s from the Old French verb cruisir or croissir, which meant to gnash the teeth, to crack, or to break with force. The French form may ultimately descend from a Germanic source imitating the sound of something being smashed, though the earliest trail is not perfectly clear. In English the literal sense of pressing or squeezing something out of shape came first, and the figurative senses of overwhelming an opponent or feeling defeated grew up around it. The playful modern noun meaning an intense, often short-lived romantic infatuation only appeared in the late nineteenth century, probably from the idea of being emotionally overwhelmed. Because the word is short and spelled exactly as it sounds, the only real trap is remembering the -sh ending rather than -ch.

How the word is built

• crush (single root from Old French cruisir: to gnash or crack); no prefix or suffix