crimp

Meanings

Adjective

• Easily crumbled; friable; brittle.
• Weak; inconsistent; contradictory.

Noun

• A fastener or a fastening method that secures parts by bending metal around a joint and squeezing it together, often with a tool that adds indentations to capture the parts.
• The natural curliness of wool fibres.
• Hair that is shaped so it bends back and forth in many short kinks.
• A card game.
• An agent who procures seamen, soldier, etc., especially by decoying, entrapping, impressing, or seducing them.
• One who infringes sub-section 1 of the Merchant Shipping Act of 1854, applied to a person other than the owner, master, etc., who engages seamen without a license from the Board of Trade.
• A keeper of a low lodging house where sailors and emigrants are entrapped and fleeced.

Verb

• To press into small ridges or folds, to pleat, to corrugate.
• To fasten by bending metal so that it squeezes around the parts to be fastened.
• To pinch and hold; to seize.
• To style hair into a crimp, to form hair into tight curls, to make it kinky.
• A small hold with little surface area
• A grip on such a hold
• To impress (seamen or soldiers); to entrap, to decoy.

Origin

• From Middle English crimpen, from Middle Dutch crimpen, crempen, from Proto-Germanic *krimpaną (compare related Old English ġecrympan). Cognate with Dutch krimpen, German Low German krimpen, Faroese kreppa ("crisis"), and Icelandic kreppa. Compare also derivative Middle English crymplen and causative crempen, both ultimately derived from the same root. See also cramp.
• Uncertain. Likely from etymology 1, above, but the historical development is not clear. Attested since the seventeenth century.