wrench

Its participle does much of the work: wrenching turns readily into an adjective and builds compounds. qntm's There Is No Antimemetics Division (2019) imagines a "mind-wrenching" countermeme. The thing hurt is a person or a mind, not a limb. For the physical injury, see the joint-injury meaning.

Screw theory uses the term for everything acting on a rigid body at once: a force vector and a torque vector bundled into one screw, worked out from Newton's laws. Contact forces at several points can each be written as one and then combined. Keep it apart from torque alone. A torque only turns, while a wrench pairs the turning with a push along a line.

A hauling machine, not a hand tool: rope or chain wound round a turning drum to lift ore or drag a boat. The use is archaic, and a modern reader can easily mistake it for the bolt-turning tool. The two share the idea of turning to apply force, and the verb of winching keeps this older image of tightening by winding.

General English has dropped this sharp-angled turn, but the idea survives in the coursing term: there, turning the hare at less than a right angle is called a wrench and scored. Outside that sport, use sharp turn or hairpin for a sudden change of direction. A wrench in a lane or trail will only puzzle a modern reader.

English has let this meaning go, but the noun's German cousin Rank still means "plot, intrigue." It names a single piece of cunning, so it takes a or the. A modern reader will hear a twist or a tool instead, so leave it to older prose. When you need the idea today, trick or ruse says it without confusion.

Faithlessness as a quality rather than an act: Old English wrenċ, kin to German Rank, "plot, intrigue". Used without an article (nothing but wrench), it names guile itself, where the "trick" meaning counts single deceptions. The use is obsolete; a reader meeting it in older writing should hear treachery, and a modern writer wanting that sense would reach for guile or deceit instead.

In older English the word could name the fastener itself rather than the tool that turns it, so a wrench set into a board is a screw. The meaning is obsolete in everyday use, yet physics has an odd echo of it: in screw theory, the mechanics term is itself a kind of screw.

Neutral where its neighbors are sly: a means to an end, not necessarily a dishonest one, unlike the 'trick' meaning. Francis Bacon, writing in 1622, makes Naples "a wrench and mean for peace," pairing the word with its near-synonym mean. Like the other cunning senses it is obsolete, and it is met only in reading.

The body does the twisting and no object is named: a creature wrenches as it writhes, where the ordinary verb wrenches something else. The intransitive use is obsolete, so a modern reader will feel an object is missing. Writhe or twist says it plainly today.

Walter Scott's The Abbot (1820) gives the tightening its darkest use: the pilniewinks and thumbikins "shall wrench it out of her finger-joints," forcing a confession out under pressure. The verb matches the archaic 'winch' noun. It is obsolete, though, and a modern reader will take wrench it out as a simple violent pull.

A verb for a blade that turns as it goes in, where the twist is part of the thrust itself. It is obsolete, so modern writing says drive or twist the blade instead. Keep it apart from the fencing disarm, where the twisting motion sends the opponent's weapon away rather than into a target.

Fencing once had a one-word name for the disarm: the fencer simply wrenched, with no object, and the whirl of the blade did the rest. That objectless pattern marks it as a term of art. Ordinary English would wrench a sword from someone's hand, as the 'take by twisting' meaning does. The fencing use is now obsolete.