squeamish means easily shocked, sickened or frightened; tending to be nauseated or nervous; oversensitive. It carries an Arena rating of 1725, earned across 14 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, squeamish ranks #2,920 of 17,132 for Most Betrayed by Its Sound, #3,896 of 17,135 for Most Malleable Words, #4,121 of 17,105 for Most Storied Words, #4,475 of 17,126 for Most Satisfying to Say.
squeamish is pronounced /ˈskwiːmɪʃ/.
Why “squeamish” is a great word
An acute, visceral aversion to the gruesome, disgusting, or bloody, manifesting as a readiness to be shocked, sickened, or disgusted. Its origin is obscure, likely a merger of earlier squeamous (from Middle English squaimous, queimous, from Anglo-Norman escoimus, escoymous, of unknown origin) and dialectal sweamish (from sweam, "dizziness," and sweem, "to swoon," from Old English *swǣman, "to grieve, afflict"), first recorded in the late 14th century. Unlike "fastidious" (which implies a scrupulousness of taste or morals) or "sensitive" (a broad receptivity), squeamish is a specific revolt of the gut. It is the sudden pallor upon glimpsing a raw wound, the involuntary shudder at the slick sound of a blade parting flesh, or the lurching, cold-sweat flight from a room where something unnamable has been spilled—a testament to the fragile truce between our civilized minds and the animal bodies that house them.
Etymology
Origin obscure. Likely a merger of earlier squeamous (“squeamish”), from Middle English squaimous, queimous, from Anglo-Norman escoimus, escoymous, of unknown origin; and dialectal English sweamish, sweemish (“faint, squeamish”), from sweam (“dizziness, sudden qualm of sickness”) and dialectal sweem (“to swoon, be faint, be overcome, feel sick”), from Middle English swemen (“to grieve, make suffer, be faint of heart”), from Old English *swǣman (“to grieve, trouble, afflict”). If so, then related to swim (“to be dizzy, swoon”). See also sweam.
adj
- Easily shocked, sickened or frightened; tending to be nauseated or nervous; oversensitive.e.g.“He might have made a good doctor, had he not been so squeamish at the sight of blood.”
- Averse or reluctant.
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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