Squeeze

How to spell squeeze

7 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce squeeze

What does squeeze mean?

1. verbTo press something firmly, often from opposite sides, or to force into or through a tight space.
2. nounAn act of pressing firmly, or a period of financial or economic pressure.

Squeeze in a sentence

• verb

  She had to squeeze the last drop of juice from the lemon.

• noun

  Rising rents have put a real squeeze on family budgets.

• verb

  We managed to squeeze all the luggage into the small boot.

• noun

  Getting six adults into the taxi was a tight squeeze.

Where does squeeze come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Squeeze is a curiously young and murky word that surfaced in English only around the year 1600. It appears to be an intensified reworking of an earlier verb 'queise' or 'quease', which carried the sense of pressing or crushing, perhaps reinforced by the energetic 's-q' opening that English likes for forceful actions (compare squash, squelch and squirt). Because no clear ancestor can be traced in Old English or in the neighbouring languages, scholars treat its exact source as genuinely uncertain. The earliest recorded uses describe pressing something hard to force out moisture, and from there the meaning broadened to mean crowding into a tight space, gripping affectionately, and, more figuratively, applying financial pressure. The double 'e' followed by the 'ze' ending is the spelling trap, since the long 'ee' sound could just as plausibly be written 'ea', as it is in 'squeak'.

How the word is built

• squeeze (single root; an English word of obscure origin, with no separable prefix or suffix)