Word.ws English Dictionary

quinch

quinch verb: to twitch, as if in pain; flinch, wince.

Verb

quinch (third-person singular simple present quinches, present participle quinching, simple past and past participle quinched)

  1. (intransitive, obsolete) To twitch, as if in pain; flinch, wince.
    • And therupon to beſtow all my Soldiers in ſuch ſort as I have done, that no part of all that Realm ſhall be able to dare to quinch […]1598, Edmund Spenser, A Vewe of the Present State of Irelande, page 213

Forms of quinch

third-person singular presentquinches
present participlequinching
past participlequinched
pastquinched

Origin of quinch

First attested 1530 as quynche, possibly from unrecorded Middle English *quinchen, itself of obscure origin. Perhaps a fusion of Middle English quicchen, quecchen (“to shake, tremble; twitch, flinch”) and Middle English winchen (“to flinch, wince; veer or move away”), making it equivalent to a blend of quitch + winch. Compare Saterland Frisian kwinkje (“to blink, wink with the eyes”), Middle Dutch quincken, quinken ("to shake, quiver"; whence modern Dutch kwinken, kwinkeleren (“to warble”)), German Low German quinken (“to blink, wink”).

Questions about quinch

What does quinch mean?
Quinch means to twitch, as if in pain; flinch, wince.
What part of speech is quinch?
Quinch is a verb.
What is the past tense of quinch?
The past tense of quinch is quinched.

Words near quinch in the dictionary

  1. quinces
  2. Quincest
  3. quincewort
  4. quinceworts
  5. Quincey
  6. quinch
  7. quincha
  8. Quinchao
  9. quinche
  10. quinched
  11. quinches

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: quinch (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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Cite this entry: “quinch.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/quinch. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.