Word.ws English Dictionary

knee-crooking

knee-crooking adjective: obsequious; submissive.

Adjective

knee-crooking (not comparable)

  1. Obsequious; submissive.
    • With his usual dose of commonsense he recognized that nothing could really change the status quo, and all that a knee-crooking knave might do in protest was to sneak a line or two into his verse simply to let off steam […]2009, Terence Barnett Magness, The Brood of Time, page 378
    • The Norman said nothing, but he did what the bystanders considered rather surprising in a knee-crooking Frenchman. Neither bending his body nor doffing his helmet, he folded his arms across his breast and looked straight into the Lucky One's eyes.2022, Ottilie A. Liljencrantz, The Thrall of Leif the Lucky: A Story of Viking Days

Origin of knee-crooking

Compare bend the knee.

Questions about knee-crooking

What does knee-crooking mean?
Knee-crooking means obsequious; submissive.
What part of speech is knee-crooking?
Knee-crooking is an adjective.

Words near knee-crooking in the dictionary

  1. knee-cap
  2. knee-capping
  3. knee-cappings
  4. knee-caps
  5. knee-cords
  6. knee-crooking
  7. knee-deep
  8. knee-deep in the Big Muddy
  9. knee-high
  10. knee-high blackberry
  11. knee-high by the Fourth of July

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: knee-crooking (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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