crimp
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crimp¹
- /kɹɪmp/
Rhymes with -ɪmp
Where it comes from
From Middle English crimpen (“to be contracted, be drawn together”), from Middle Dutch crimpen, crempen (“to crimp”), from Proto-Germanic *krimpaną (“to shrink, draw back”) (compare related Old English ġecrympan (“to curl”)). Cognate with Dutch krimpen, German Low German krimpen, Faroese kreppa (“crisis”), and Icelandic kreppa (“to bend tightly, clench”). Compare also derivative Middle English crymplen (“to wrinkle”) and causative crempen (“to turn something back, restrain”, literally “to cause to shrink or draw back”), both ultimately derived from the same root. See also cramp.
adjective
- Easily crumbled; friable; brittle. Now the Fowler […] Treads the crimp Earth,
- Weak; inconsistent; contradictory. The evidence is crimp; the witnesses swear backward and forward, and contradict themselves
noun crimps
- A fastener or a fastening method that secures parts by bending metal around a joint and squeezing it together, often with a tool that adds indentations to capture the parts. The strap was held together by a simple metal crimp.
- The natural curliness of wool fibres.
- Hair that is shaped so it bends back and forth in many short kinks.
- A card game. Lady Loadstone: Laugh, and keep company, at gleek or crimp. / Mistress Polish: Your ladyship says right, crimp sure will cure her.
- A small hold with little surface area.
- A grip on such a hold.
verb crimps · crimping · crimped
- To press into small ridges or folds, to pleat, to corrugate. Cornish pasties are crimped during preparation.
- To fasten by bending metal so that it squeezes around the parts to be fastened. He crimped the wire in place.
- To pinch and hold; to seize.
- To style hair into a crimp, to form hair into tight curls, to make it kinky.
- To bend or mold leather into shape.
- To gash the flesh, e.g. of a raw fish, to make it crisper when cooked.
- to hold using a crimp
crimp²
- /kɹɪmp/
Rhymes with -ɪmp
Where it comes from
Uncertain. Likely from etymology 1, above, but the historical development is not clear. Attested since the seventeenth century.
noun crimps
- An agent who procures seamen, soldiers, etc., especially by decoying, entrapping, impressing, or seducing them. Indeed, when a maſter of a ſhip, ſuppoſe at Jamaica, hath loſt any of his hands, he applies of courſe to a crimp[…]who makes it his buſineſs to ſeduce the men belonging to ſome other ſhip,
- One who infringes sub-section 1 of the Merchant Shipping Act 1854, applied to a person other than the owner, master, etc., who engages seamen without a license from the Board of Trade.
- A keeper of a low lodging house where sailors and emigrants are entrapped and fleeced.
verb crimps · crimping · crimped
- To impress (seamen or soldiers); to entrap, to decoy. […]nay, where in any corner he can spy a tall man, clutching at him, to crimp him or impress him.
