shrinks

1. 1
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present of shrink.

   Cotton fabric shrinks if it's dried at high heat.

   The glacier shrinks measurably during each warm summer.

   Note

   One form serves both directions of the verb: a hot dryer shrinks a sweater, and a sweater shrinks in a hot dryer. It also carries the meaning of drawing back in fear or disgust, where it usually takes from, as in she shrinks from the needle or he shrinks from confrontation. Whether an object follows, and what kind, tells the readings apart.

   A hot dryer shrinks a wool sweater in minutes.

   He shrinks from any kind of confrontation.

2. 2
   noun

   Plural of shrink.

   After years of therapy, she'd seen more shrinks than she could count.

   Hollywood films are full of shrinks who break every professional rule.

   Note

   In practice the plural nearly always means therapists. The retail sense of lost inventory is uncountable, so a store reports its shrink, not its shrinks. The psychiatrist sense is slang and sometimes derogatory: friends joke about their shrinks, but a clinic would not use the word for its own staff.

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