Crushes

How to spell crushes

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce crushes

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does crushes mean?

1. verbPresses or squeezes something with enough force to break, flatten, or deform it.
2. nounSudden, often short-lived feelings of romantic attraction toward someone.

Crushes in a sentence

• verb

  The recycling machine crushes each aluminium can completely flat.

• noun

  Her teenage crushes were almost all on musicians she had never met.

• verb

  A heavy frost crushes the tender seedlings against the cold soil.

• noun

  The two friends laughed about the harmless crushes they had in school.

Where does crushes come from?

Language of origin: French

The base word crush arrived in English in the 1300s from Old French croissir or cruissir, a verb meaning 'to gnash, crack, or break with a loud noise', which is thought to come ultimately from a Germanic source imitating the sound of something snapping. Early uses kept that violent, noisy sense of grinding or smashing something to pieces, and over time it broadened to mean any forceful pressing or compressing. The familiar emotional sense, a sudden infatuation, grew up much later, in the late nineteenth century, from the idea of being figuratively overwhelmed or pressed by feeling. The form crushes simply adds the regular -es ending, used both when the verb takes a third-person singular subject and when the noun is made plural. Because the root already ends in the sh sound, the -es (rather than a bare -s) is what English regularly attaches, which is the only thing worth remembering about the spelling.

How the word is built

• crush (to press, break)
• -es (third-person singular verb / plural noun ending)