hinge
/ˈhɪnd͡ʒ/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: 3.32 in modern English
9
Scrabble Score
5
Letters
1
Syllables
5
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
A naturally occurring joint resembling such hardware in form or action, as in the shell of a bivalve.
noun
A stamp hinge, a folded and gummed paper rectangle for affixing postage stamps in an album.
noun
A principle, or a point in time, on which subsequent reasonings or events depend.
noun
A movement that presents itself as rotation when an off-centre fixed point is taken into account.
Example Sentences
- "The massy portals of the churches swung creaking on their hinges; and some lay dead on the pavement."
- "The pedicel of the pollinium is articulated as before by a hinge to the disc; it can move freely only in one direction owing to one end of the disc being upturned."
- "This argument was the hinge on which the question turned."
- "But let me say, with all deference, that these positions do not appear to me to touch the hinge of the argument before us."
- "These grown-up children were at that hinge of life when parents must begin to shrink and fold."
- "If when the Moon is in the Hinge at East, / The Birth breaks forward from its native rest; / Full Eighty Years, if you two Years abate, / This Station gives, and long defers its Fate"
Etymology
From Middle English henge (“hinge”), from Old English *henġ or *henġe (“hinge”), from Proto-West Germanic *hangiju or *hangī; compare Old English *henġe- in henġeclif (“overhanging cliff”), Old English henġen (“hanging; that upon which a thing is hung”). Akin to Scots heenge (“hinge”), Saterland Frisian Hänge (“hinge”), Low German henge (“hook, hinge, handle”), Dutch heng (“moving leaf of a hinge”), Dutch geheng (“hinge”), Middle Dutch henghe, hanghe (“hook, hinge, handle”), Scots hingel (“any attachment by which something is hung or fastened”), Dutch hengel (“hook”), hengsel (“handle”), dialectal German Hängel (“hook, joint”), Henkel (“handle, hook”), Danish hængsel (“hinge”), Faroese hongsl (“hinge”), Icelandic hengsli (“hinge”), Norwegian hengsel (“hinge”), Swedish hängsle (“suspender”), Old English hōn (“to hang”), Old English hangian (“to cause to hang, hang up”). More at hang.