Word.ws English Dictionary

curglaff

curglaff noun: the shock felt when one first plunges into cold water.

Noun

curglaff (uncountable)

  1. (Scotland, dialectal) The shock felt when one first plunges into cold water.
    • Even as the curtains are being pulled in around you, you will probably experience the curglaff, which is another old Scots term, this time for the feeling you get when you're hit with cold water. Your heart gallops, your blood rushes, and, if you're Benjamin Franklin, you don't like it one little...2012, Mark Forsyth, The Horologicon, →ISBN
    • The recent spate of – welcome – technology IPOs sent the market into a curglaff when many offerings promptly started a freefall from their market highs, leaving many burned retail investors in their wake.2013 March 9, Alex Wilhelm, “Stocks at all time highs? Not if you look at these recently public tech companies”, in TNW News

Questions about curglaff

What does curglaff mean?
Curglaff means the shock felt when one first plunges into cold water.
What part of speech is curglaff?
Curglaff is a noun.

Words near curglaff in the dictionary

  1. curfs
  2. curfuffle
  3. curfuffled
  4. curfuffles
  5. curfuffling
  6. curglaff
  7. curia
  8. Curia Muria
  9. curia regis
  10. curiae
  11. curial

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: curglaff (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.

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