Word.ws English Dictionary

feel the pinch

feel the pinch verb: to suffer a hardship, especially significant financial pressure.

Verb

feel the pinch (third-person singular simple present feels the pinch, present participle feeling the pinch, simple past and past participle felt the pinch)

  1. (idiomatic, informal) To suffer a hardship, especially significant financial pressure.
    • Working-class families are feeling the pinch in the wake of the recession.
    • The tramway was offered to the Dublin, Wicklow & Wexford Railway, but that company expressed no interest in it. Then the tramway proprietors decided to electrify their line, and cut the fares by half, and the railway was soon feeling the pinch.1954 May, H. Fayle, “Dublin Suburban Services”, in Railway Magazine, page 300

feel the pinch meaning in Tamil and Malayalam

feel the pinch in Tamil

கையைக் கடித்தல், நெருக்கடியை ஏற்படுத்துதல்

feel the pinch in Malayalam

be poor, suffer hardship, be short of money
കഷ്ടപ്പെടുക, അരിഷ്ടിക്കുക, ദാരിദ്ര്യം അനുഭവിക്കുക, കഷ്ടപ്പാടറിയുക, വാർത്തപ്പെടുക, ബുദ്ധിമുട്ടുക

Forms of feel the pinch

third-person singular presentfeels the pinch
present participlefeeling the pinch
past participlefelt the pinch
pastfelt the pinch

Questions about feel the pinch

What does feel the pinch mean?
Feel the pinch means to suffer a hardship, especially significant financial pressure.
What is feel the pinch in Tamil?
Feel the pinch in Tamil is கையைக் கடித்தல், நெருக்கடியை ஏற்படுத்துதல். See Feel the pinch meaning in Tamil.
What part of speech is feel the pinch?
Feel the pinch is a verb.
What is the past tense of feel the pinch?
The past tense of feel the pinch is felt the pinch.

Words near feel the pinch in the dictionary

  1. feel sorry for
  2. feel ten feet tall
  3. feel the Bern
  4. feel the burn
  5. feel the heat
  6. feel the pinch
  7. feel twelve feet tall
  8. feel up
  9. feel-bad
  10. feel-good
  11. feel-good factor

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: feel the pinch (page history and authors); feel the pinch (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors); feel the pinch (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license). 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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-feel the pinch.ogg.

Cite this entry: “feel the pinch.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/feel_the_pinch. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.