cripple
/ˈkɹɪp(ə)l/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: 3.22 in modern English
13
Scrabble Score
7
Letters
2
Syllables
6
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
A person who has severely impaired physical abilities because of deformation, injury, or amputation of parts of the body.
Countable; Offensive; Uncountable
noun
A person who is severely impaired or deficient in some non-physical way.
Countable; Uncountable
Example Sentences
- "And chide the cripple tardy-gaited night, who, like a foul and ugly witch, doth limp so tediously away."
- "Early treatment, and treatment spread over a long period, was the on means of rendering a cripple child fit to mix with its fellows on anything like equal terms, […]"
- "You let sin in a church and it will cripple that church's ministry. Let sin get its ugly hands on the life of an individual and it will wreck and ruin and twist any life that it gets a hold on. Here was a cripple man who was excluded from the temple."
- "Other[s] think that, certain challenges are for certain people and not for them, that the reason when some women give birth to a cripple child, or male child instead to a female child, they think God did not answer their wishes, forgetting that every child is a gift from God […]"
- "He held the cripple boy like a towel. The cripple boy's arms and legs dangled uselessly over his father's arm, one of each on either side, while his father balanced the diaper-clad boy on his forearm."
- "He returned from war a cripple."
Etymology
Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *grewbʰ-der. Proto-Germanic *kreupaną Proto-Indo-European *-lósder.? Proto-Indo-European *-tḗr Proto-Indo-European *-tromder.? Proto-Germanic *-ilaz Proto-Germanic *krupilaz Proto-West Germanic *krupil Old English crypel Middle English crepelder. English cripple From Middle English cripel, crepel, crüpel, from Old English crypel (“crippled; a cripple”), from Proto-Germanic *krupilaz (“tending to crawl; a cripple”), from Proto-Indo-European *grewb- (“to bend, crouch, crawl”), from Proto-Indo-European *ger- (“to bend, twist”), equivalent to creep + -le. Cognate with Dutch kreupel, Low German Kröpel, German Krüppel, Old Norse kryppill.