Crankle
//ˈkɹæŋkəl// noun, verb
noun, verb ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
Noun
- 1 A bend, twist or crinkle.
Verb
- 1 To bend, turn, or wind.
"Meander, who is said so intricate to bee, Hath not so many turnes, nor crankling nookes as shee."
- 2 To break into bends, turns, or angles; to crinkle.
"Old Vaga's stream […] drew her humid train aslope, / Crankling her banks."
Example
More examples"Meander, who is said so intricate to bee, Hath not so many turnes, nor crankling nookes as shee."
Etymology
From crank + -le. Coined by Michael Drayton in 1596. According to the Poly-Olbion project, "Drayton probably derived ‘crankling’ from ‘crank’, a word which had its first recorded usage in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (1594) where it describes a hare which ‘crankes and crosses with a thousand doubles’."
Related phrases
More for "crankle"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.