Word.ws English Dictionary

writer's cramp

writer's cramp noun: a debilitating pain preventing easy movement of the wrist, hand, or fingers, resulting from prolonged use of a pen or pencil.

Noun

writer's cramp (uncountable)

  1. (idiomatic) A debilitating pain preventing easy movement of the wrist, hand, or fingers, resulting from prolonged use of a pen or pencil.
    • The recording of their tales is no more than a matter of ears and fingers. There are only two fates I dread—deafness and writer's cramp.c. 1900, O. Henry, He Also Serves
    • "The following boys will go in to extra lesson this afternoon and next Wednesday," it began. And "the following boys" numbered four hundred.
      "Bates must have got writer's cramp," said Clowes, as he read the huge scroll.1909, P. G. Wodehouse, chapter 12, in Mike: A Public School Story

Examples of writer's cramp in a sentence

  • He had writer's cramp by the time he finished.1922, Peter B. Kyne, chapter 23, in Cappy Ricks Retires:
  • Henry James, after he suffered an attack of writer's cramp, began to dictate to a typist.2007 Nov. 4, John Updike, "On Literary Biography" (excerpt from Due Considerations), New York Times (retrieved 9 Dec 2011)

Synonyms of writer's cramp

Questions about writer's cramp

What does writer's cramp mean?
Writer's cramp means a debilitating pain preventing easy movement of the wrist, hand, or fingers, resulting from prolonged use of a pen or pencil.
How do you use writer's cramp in a sentence?
He had writer's cramp by the time he finished.
What part of speech is writer's cramp?
Writer's cramp is a noun.

Words near writer's cramp in the dictionary

  1. writeprint
  2. writeprints
  3. writer
  4. writer's block
  5. writer's blocks
  6. writer's cramp
  7. writercraft
  8. writerdom
  9. writeress
  10. writeresses
  11. writerish

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: writer's cramp (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-writer's cramp.ogg.

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