Making a soft sucking sound like wet footsteps in mud; or crushing or suppressing something.
From the verb 'squelch,' likely an onomatopoeia imitating the actual sound of walking through mud or wet terrain, first used in the 1600s.
Squelch is a glorious onomatopoeia that British people especially love—it describes both the sound and the sensation simultaneously. The word nearly disappeared but has been revived in modern British slang to mean 'crushing a romantic rumor,' making it doubly descriptive of something being squashed.
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