To shrink or contract; to flinch or wince (archaic or dialectal).
Variant or related to 'crimp' or 'cringe,' from Middle Dutch 'krimpen' or Old English sources meaning to shrink. Possibly conflated with 'cringe' or 'bunch' in dialectal usage.
This is an extremely rare word that appears mainly in historical or dialectal texts—it shows how English had many variants for similar concepts (crimp, cringe, crinch, cinch), and over time, speakers standardized around a few winners while the others faded.
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