scrimp means short; scanty; curtailed. It carries an Arena rating of 1612, earned across 8 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, scrimp ranks #1,197 of 17,143 for Best Fossil-Poetry Words, #1,514 of 17,142 for Most Ingenious Words, #1,962 of 17,163 for Funniest Words, #2,543 of 17,127 for Words That Escaped Their Books.
scrimp is pronounced /skɹɪmp/.
Why “scrimp” is a great word
To be extremely frugal or sparing, often to the point of hardship, in order to save or economize. From Scots scrimp ("meager"), from Middle Dutch or Middle Low German schrimpen ("to shrivel up, wrinkle"), from Proto-Germanic *skrimpaną ("to shrink"), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)ker- ("to cut off"). First recorded in English 1710–20. Unlike skimp, which implies a shoddy, insufficient result, or splurge, its direct and lavish opposite, to scrimp is to inhabit a sustained, deliberate discipline of parsimony. It is the precise measure of soap shavings dissolved in water, the winter coat worn thin at the cuffs, the careful warmth from a fire fed only with the smallest sticks—a quiet, daily calculus where life is measured not in moments but in minor denials.
Etymology
From Scots scrimp (“meager”), from Middle Dutch or Middle Low German schrimpen (“to shrivel up, wrinkle”), from Old Dutch *scrimpan, from Frankish *skrimpan, ultimately from Proto-Germanic *skrimpaną (“to shrink”), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)ker- (“to cut off”), related to Old English sċrimman (“to shrink”) and sċrincan (“to shrivel up”). Doublet of shrink, shrimp, and shrim.
adj
- Short; scanty; curtailed.
noun
- A pinching miser; a niggard.
verb
- To make too small or short; to shortchange.e.g.“to scrimp the pattern of a coat”
- To limit or straiten; to put on short allowance.e.g.“For, as a general thing, the English merchant-ship scrimps her crew; but not so the English whaler.” — 1851 November 14, Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers; London: Richard Bentley, →OCLC:
- To be frugal, whether to a reasonable and wise extent or to a miserly and unwise extent.e.g.““Oh, Electra, jewel of women, darling of my heart, we are free at last, we roll in wealth, we need never scrimp again. It's a case for Veuve Cliquot!”” — 1904, Mark Twain, The $30,000 Bequest:
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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