crying game
crying game noun: a situation where someone cries in a spiteful, self-indulgent, or attention-seeking manner.
Noun
crying game (plural crying games)
- A situation where someone cries in a spiteful, self-indulgent, or attention-seeking manner.
- It's only when you remove all remnants of the guy from your life that you can move on. No Contact. Until you are completely over the guy, avoid all contact. If the guy's an asshole, he'll try to contact you, and probably run the crying game on you.2011, Willie Booker, Life’s Too Short to Date Men Like Me, iUniverse, published 2011, →ISBN, page 58
- Waaaaa! Waaaaa! If you let it, life can become nothing more than a crying game that is void of accountability and void of responsibility.2011, Perry Pokrandt, Life Lessons: What Experience Teaches Us About Success, Xlibris, published 2011, →ISBN, page 293
Proper noun capitalized: Crying Game
Crying Game
- A situation in which something or someone is revealed to be other than assumed/expected to be, particularly with regard to gender identity.
- Man, what a way to pop a balloon full of promise! It was like waiting to be with the girl of your dreams and you end up in the Crying Game.2002, David Payton, I Dreamed I Killed Osama Bin Laden, Trafford, →ISBN
- We copped a feel of the technical beta of Microsoft's Windows Media Player 10, and beneath the slick new interface we found a Crying Game-scale surprise that has the potential to lure insatiable music grazers away from iTunes (which has now sold more than 100 million tracks).2004 September, “Hands on Microsoft's Windows Media Player 10”, in Maximum PC, page 15
Forms of crying game
| plural | crying games |
|---|
Origin of crying game
From the 1992 film The Crying Game, which features a scene in which a man discovers that his lover, implicitly presented up to that point as a cis woman, is in fact a pre-op/non-op trans woman.
Questions about crying game
- What does crying game mean?
- Crying game means a situation where someone cries in a spiteful, self-indulgent, or attention-seeking manner.
- What part of speech is crying game?
- Crying game can be a noun or a proper noun.
- What is the plural of crying game?
- The plural of crying game is crying games.
Words near crying game in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: crying game (page history and authors); Crying Game (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:
Cite this entry: “crying game.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/crying_game. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.