crush
pronunciation
How to pronounce crush in British English:
UK [krʌʃ]
How to pronounce crush in American English:
US [krʌʃ]
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- Noun:
- leather that has had its grain pattern accentuated
- a dense crowd of people
- temporary love of an adolescent
- the act of crushing
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- Verb:
- come down on or keep down by unjust use of one's authority
- to compress with violence, out of natural shape or condition
- come out better in a competition, race, or conflict
- break into small pieces
- humiliate or depress completely
- crush or bruise
- make ineffective
- become injured, broken, or distorted by pressure
Word Origin
- crush
- crush: [14] The emergence of crush is something of a mystery. English borrowed it from Old French croissir, but it is not clear where Old French got it from. Some consider it to be of Romance origin, postulating a hypothetical Vulgar Latin *cruscīre to account for it, but others suggest that Old French may have borrowed it from Germanic, pointing to the similarity of Middle Low German krossen ‘crush’.
- crush (v.)
- mid-14c., from Old French cruissir (Modern French écraser), variant of croissir "to gnash (teeth), crash, break," perhaps from Frankish *krostjan "to gnash" (cognates: Gothic kriustan, Old Swedish krysta "to gnash"). Figurative sense of "to humiliate, demoralize" is c. 1600. Related: Crushed; crushing. Italian crosciare, Catalan cruxir, Spanish crujirare "to crack" are Germanic loan-words.
- crush (n.)
- 1590s, "act of crushing," from crush (v.). Meaning "thick crowd" is from 1806. Sense of "person one is infatuated with" is first recorded 1884; to have a crush on is from 1913.
Example
- 1. Number 365 comes forward into the final crush .
- 2. I stand on a platform overlooking the crush , next to the slaughterman .
- 3. During the military 's final offensive to crush the rebels , unicef said hundreds of children had been killed in the months of battle in the north .
- 4. That was part of what I believe was a grand bargain , struck between the bush administration and the mullahs of iran , that freed up us troops to crush al-qaeda .
- 5. Since the newly agreed buffer zone may make it harder for the south to send arms and supplies across the border , hawks in the north may believe they have a chance to crush the rebellions .