crinkle

[prettygoodword]

crinkle (KRING-kuhl) - v., to fold, crease, crumple, or wrinkle; to make slight sharp sounds, rustle.


Plus a noun of both the action and the sound. This frequentive is obscured not by sound change but through loss of the stem: it goes back to Middle English form crinklen, to bend/buckle, from reconstructed Old English *crinclian, frequentive form of crincan, to bend/yield, which has not directly survived in Modern English but is, via a few alterations, the ancestor of cringe.

And that's a week of frequentive verbs, which has been wild -- def doing more of this.

---L.

Comments

[de_eekhoorn]

Some Wiktionary sleuthing says crincan is related to Dutch / German Kring (circle), and slightly less directly to Dutch krenken / German kränken (to hurt or injure, generally someone's feelings or dignity), via German krank, 'ill', from Protogermanic *krankaz, 'bent, weak'.

[prettygoodword]

That tracks.