crimp
/kɹɪmp/
crimp adjective: easily crumbled; friable; brittle.
Adjective
crimp
- Easily crumbled; friable; brittle.
- Now the Fowler […] Treads the crimp Earth,1708, John Philips, Cyder. A Poem, page 27
- Weak; inconsistent; contradictory.
- The evidence is crimp; the witnesses swear backward and forward, and contradict themselves1750, John Arbuthnot, The History of John Bull
Noun (1)
crimp (plural crimps)
- A fastener or a fastening method that secures parts by bending metal around a joint and squeezing it together, often with a tool that adds indentations to capture the parts.
- The strap was held together by a simple metal crimp.
- The natural curliness of wool fibres.
- Hair that is shaped so it bends back and forth in many short kinks.
- A card game.
- Lady Loadstone: Laugh, and keep company, at gleek or crimp. / Mistress Polish: Your ladyship says right, crimp sure will cure her.1632 (first performance), Benjamin Jonson [i.e., Ben Jonson], “The Magnetick Lady: Or, Humors Reconcil’d. A Comedy […]”, in The Workes of Benjamin Jonson. The Second Volume. […] (Second Folio)...
- A small hold with little surface area.
- A grip on such a hold.
Verb (1)
crimp (third-person singular simple present crimps, present participle crimping, simple past and past participle crimped)
- To press into small ridges or folds, to pleat, to corrugate.
- Cornish pasties are crimped during preparation.
- Casino employees and Gaming Control Board agents placed the table under observation. The deck in play was exchanged for a new deck, and the used deck was found to contain many crimped cards.1983, The Pacific Reporter, page 636
- To fasten by bending metal so that it squeezes around the parts to be fastened.
- He crimped the wire in place.
- To pinch and hold; to seize.
- To style hair into a crimp, to form hair into tight curls, to make it kinky.
- To bend or mold leather into shape.
- To gash the flesh, e.g. of a raw fish, to make it crisper when cooked.
- to hold using a crimp
Noun (2)
crimp (plural crimps)
- An agent who procures seamen, soldiers, etc., especially by decoying, entrapping, impressing, or seducing them.
- Indeed, when a maſter of a ſhip, ſuppoſe at Jamaica, hath loſt any of his hands, he applies of courſe to a crimp[…]who makes it his buſineſs to ſeduce the men belonging to ſome other ſhip,1758, John Blake, A Plan, for regulating the Marine System of Great Britain, page 44
- Walking the street very hungry, and not knowing what to do with himself, a crimp's bill was put into his hand, offering immediate entertainment and encouragement to such as would bind themselves to serve in America. He went directly, sign'd the indentures, was put into the ship, and came over...1771–1790, Benjamin Franklin, “The Autobiography [Part 1]”, in John Bigelow, editor, Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. […], Philadelphia, Pa.: J[oshua] B[allinger] Lippincott & Co., published 1868...
- One who infringes sub-section 1 of the Merchant Shipping Act 1854, applied to a person other than the owner, master, etc., who engages seamen without a license from the Board of Trade.
- A keeper of a low lodging house where sailors and emigrants are entrapped and fleeced.
Verb (2)
crimp (third-person singular simple present crimps, present participle crimping, simple past and past participle crimped)
- To impress (seamen or soldiers); to entrap, to decoy.
- […]nay, where in any corner he can spy a tall man, clutching at him, to crimp him or impress him.1831 March, Thomas Carlyle, “Historic Survey of German Poetry By W. Taylor”, in The Edinburgh Review, volume 53, page 168
- To the Reverend Fathers, it seemed that Denis would make an excellent Jesuit; wherefore they set about coaxing and courting, with intent to crimp him.1833 April, Thomas Carlyle, “Mémoires, Correspondance, et Ouvrage inédit de Diderot”, in The Foreign Quarterly Review, page 269
- Synonyms:
- shanghai
crimp meaning in Tamil, Bengali, Malayalam and Kannada
crimp in Tamil
- அலைவு
crimp in Bengali
- কুচকানো
crimp in Malayalam
- fold, pleat, flute
- ചുരുട്ടുക, ചുളുക്കുക, ചുളിക്കുക, ചുരുക്കുവയ്ക്കുക, ചുരുളനാക്കുക, ഞൊറിവച്ചു തയ്ക്കുക
crimp in Kannada
- ನೆರಿಗೆಬರಿಸು, ಸುಕ್ಕುಬರಿಸು
Examples of crimp in a sentence
- Jack and Metsy at Portsmouth, fitting out the vessel, and offering three guineas ahead to the crimps for every good able seaman1836, Frederick Marryat, Mr Midshipman Easy, page 350:
- I hear there are plenty of good men stowed away by the crimps at different places.1842, Frederick Marryat, Percival Keene, page 215:
- As Count Antoine was in the habit of sallying forth at night[…]he came near being carried off by a gang of crimps1840, Washington Irving, “The Count Van Horn”, in The Knickerbocker, page 243:
- The World Went Very Well Then—in the high and palmy days of the crimp, the pirate, the press-gang, and the smuggler—is a case in point.1887 May 21, “Mr Besant's romance of the sea”, in The Spectator, volume 60, page 691:
Synonyms of crimp
Forms of crimp
| Noun | |
|---|---|
| plural | crimps |
| Verb | |
| third-person singular present | crimps |
| present participle | crimping |
| past participle | crimped |
| past | crimped |
Origin of crimp
From Middle English crimpen (“to be contracted, be drawn together”), from Middle Dutch crimpen, crempen (“to crimp”), from Proto-Germanic *krimpaną (“to shrink, draw back”) (compare related Old English ġecrympan (“to curl”)). Cognate with Dutch krimpen, German Low German krimpen, Faroese kreppa (“crisis”), and Icelandic kreppa (“to bend tightly, clench”). Compare also derivative Middle English crymplen (“to wrinkle”) and causative crempen (“to turn something back, restrain”, literally “to cause to shrink or draw back”), both ultimately derived from the same root. See also cramp.
Uncertain. Likely from etymology 1, above, but the historical development is not clear. Attested since the seventeenth century.
Words formed from crimp
Phrases with crimp
Words that rhyme with crimp
Questions about crimp
- What does crimp mean?
- Crimp means easily crumbled; friable; brittle.
- What is crimp in Tamil?
- Crimp in Tamil is அலைவு. See Crimp meaning in Tamil.
- How do you use crimp in a sentence?
- Jack and Metsy at Portsmouth, fitting out the vessel, and offering three guineas ahead to the crimps for every good able seaman
- What part of speech is crimp?
- Crimp can be an adjective, a noun or a verb.
- How do you pronounce crimp?
- Crimp is pronounced /kɹɪmp/.
Words near crimp in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: crimp (page history and authors); crimp (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors); crimp (Bengali Wiktionary) (page history and authors); crimp (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license); crimp (Kannada Wiktionary) (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-crimp.ogg.
Cite this entry: “crimp.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/crimp. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.