scrunt
/skɹʌnt/
scrunt noun: an abrupt, high-pitched sound.
Noun (1)
scrunt (plural scrunts)
- An abrupt, high-pitched sound.
- Just as they were in the roughest part of the mountains, there was a wild shriek of the whistle, a sudden scrunt of the air-brakes, and the train, with an abruptness that was just short of an accident, stopped.1894, Robert Barr, "Held Up," McClure's Magazine, 1893-1894 Dec-May, p. 309
- But Jess would not budge, and all of a sudden I sees a white flash in the dark, and hears a rattle of harness, and a scrunt in the shafts as Jess shook her head clear of the blow.1901, David S. Meldrum, "The Conquest of Charlotte," Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, v.171, 1902 Jan-Jun, pg. 128
Noun (2)
scrunt (plural scrunts)
- A beggar or destitute person.
- It's a fine, ennobling thing, is poverty. It would make me a brutal scrunt, and you a whinging harridan in three years.1938, James Bridie, The Last Trump, Constable, page 29
- And without my work what am I but an unemployed scrunt on the meat market of the streets?1987, David Rabe, Hurlyburly: A Play, publ. Samuel French, Inc., →ISBN, page 112
Verb
scrunt (third-person singular simple present scrunts, present participle scrunting, simple past and past participle scrunted)
- To beg or scrounge.
- On the other hand in countries where people scrunt to live, the birth rate is high.1976 February 2, Alister Hughes, “Love Carefully”, in The Virgin Islands Daily News
- Four out of every five women are forced to stay at home or scrunt for a meagre existence.1979, Maurice Bishop, Selected Speeches, 1979-1981, Casa de las Américas, pg. 11
Examples of scrunt in a sentence
- They rose, and the scrunt of Janet's chair on the floor, when she pushed it behind her, sent a thrilling shiver through her body, so tense was her mood.2004, George Douglas Brown, The House with the Green Shutters, Kessinger Publishing, →ISBN, page 243:
- Not slum-dweller socialist but high-class fanny socialist. [...] Socialism that drinks wine - a single bottle costs a year's pay to a fuckin scrunt like Uxbridge.2005, Ronan O'Donnell, The Doll Tower, →ISBN, page 20:
- As a woman of color living in the north of Metropole, anything that I did dig up I really had to scrunt for.1996, Defining Ourselves: Black Writers in the 90s, publ. P. Lang, published 1999, →ISBN, page 69:
Forms of scrunt
| Noun | |
|---|---|
| plural | scrunts |
| Verb | |
| third-person singular present | scrunts |
| present participle | scrunting |
| past participle | scrunted |
| past | scrunted |
Origin of scrunt
Onomatopoetic.
Unknown etymology. The term appears related to Old Norse *skrindr (“starved, meager, emaciated, haggard, thin”), found as Old Swedish skrinder, Swedish skrinn, skrin, Norwegian skrann, skrinn, potentially related to Lithuanian skrèsti (“getting scabby”). A related root is found in scrawny, scranny and scrannel, to an old root for drying out, such as Old English scrinian (“to dry”); compare Swedish skranig, skranglig, skral, skran, Norwegian skran, Danish skrån (“scrawny, meager, dry, barren”). More direct cognates appear to exist in North Germanic, with the comparative root sense of “skeleton, dried body” → “decrepit, frail, rickety (person)”, but many roots appear to be at play (compare Proto-Germanic *skraudō): dialectal Norwegian skrunt (“fruit scraps”) (such as an “apple core (apple skeleton), eaten apple, apple scraps” (and thereof)), skrunta (“(skin) crease”), dialectal Swedish skrynta, skrönta (“body, back, shoulderblade, hollow tree (tree skeleton)”), with a predominant variation without the -n-: dialectal Norwegian skrott (“body; fruit scraps”), Swedish skrutt, skrott (“scrap, decrepit (old) useless person, scrotum, dried wrinkly body, skeleton, the devil”) (skrutta f...
Words formed from scrunt
Words that rhyme with scrunt
Questions about scrunt
- What does scrunt mean?
- Scrunt means an abrupt, high-pitched sound.
- How do you use scrunt in a sentence?
- They rose, and the scrunt of Janet's chair on the floor, when she pushed it behind her, sent a thrilling shiver through her body, so tense was her mood.
- What part of speech is scrunt?
- Scrunt can be a noun or a verb.
- How do you pronounce scrunt?
- Scrunt is pronounced /skɹʌnt/.
- What is the plural of scrunt?
- The plural of scrunt is scrunts.
Words near scrunt in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: scrunt (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:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-scrunt.ogg, LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-scrunt.wav.
Cite this entry: “scrunt.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/scrunt. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.