cringes

1. 1
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present of cringe.

   The dog cringes and backs away at the first crack of thunder.

   My grandmother cringes every time someone curses at the dinner table.

   Note

   In modern use the verb takes no direct object. A person simply cringes, and the cause follows as a clause or a prepositional phrase. Older English let it act on something: one could cringe a limb close to the body, wrinkle the face by cringing it, or cringe to a superior by bowing low. Those transitive uses are now obsolete. The servile meaning survives only without an object, as in someone who cringes before power.

2. 2
   noun

   Plural of cringe.

   Her embarrassing dating stories produced cringes from everyone around the table.

   The awkward dialogue in that movie earned more cringes than laughs.

   Note

   Only some meanings of the noun take this plural. The physical recoil, the servile bow and the British dialect word for a crick are all countable, so a table of listeners can produce cringes. The slang use for secondhand-embarrassing online content is a mass noun and resists it: that video is pure cringe, not a cringe. The same spelling also serves as the present-tense verb, and context keeps them apart.

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