different between pickle vs pinch

English

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /?p?kl?/
• Rhymes: -?k?l

Etymology 1

From Middle English pikel, pykyl, pekille, pigell (“spicy sauce served with meat or fish”), borrowed from Middle Dutch, Middle Low German pekel (“brine”). Cognate with Scots pikkill (“salt liquor, brine”), Saterland Frisian Piekele (“pickle, brine”), Dutch pekel (“pickle, brine”), Low German pekel, peckel, pickel, bickel (“pickle, brine”), German Pökel (“pickle, brine”).

Alternative forms

• pickel (obsolete and rare)

Noun

pickle (countable and uncountable, plural pickles)

1. A cucumber preserved in a solution, usually a brine or a vinegar syrup.

   A pickle goes well with a hamburger.

2. (often in the plural) Any vegetable preserved in vinegar and consumed as relish.
3. A sweet, vinegary pickled chutney popular in Britain.
4. The brine used for preserving food.

   This tub is filled with the pickle that we will put the small cucumbers into.

5. (informal) A difficult situation; peril.

   The climber found himself in a pickle when one of the rocks broke off.

   • 1955, Rex Stout, "Die Like a Dog", in Three Witnesses, October 1994 Bantam edition, ?ISBN, page 194:

     I beg you, Miss Jones, to realize the pickle you're in.

6. (endearing) A mildly mischievous loved one.
7. (baseball) A rundown.

   Jones was caught in a pickle between second and third.

8. (uncountable) A children’s game with three participants that emulates a baseball rundown

   The boys played pickle in the front yard for an hour.

9. (slang) A penis.
10. (slang) A pipe for smoking methamphetamine.

    Load some shards in that pickle.

11. (metalworking) A bath of dilute sulphuric or nitric acid, etc., to remove burnt sand, scale, rust, etc., from the surface of castings, or other articles of metal, or to brighten them or improve their colour.
12. In an optical landing system, the hand-held controller connected to the lens, or apparatus on which the lights are mounted.

Synonyms

• (penis): See also Thesaurus:penis

Derived terms

• in a pickle
• pickle switch

Descendants

• ? Dutch: pickles
• ? French: pickles
• ? Irish: picil
• ? Korean: ?? (pikeul)
• ? Spanish: pickles
• ? Welsh: picil

Translations

See also

• piccalilli

Verb

pickle (third-person singular simple present pickles, present participle pickling, simple past and past participle pickled)

1. (transitive, ergative) To preserve food (or sometimes other things) in a salt, sugar or vinegar solution.

   We pickled the remainder of the crop.

   These cucumbers pickle very well.

   • For more quotations using this term, see Citations:pickle.
2. (transitive) To remove high-temperature scale and oxidation from metal with heated (often sulphuric) industrial acid.

   The crew will pickle the fittings in the morning.

3. (programming) (in the Python programming language) To serialize.
   • 2005, Peter Norton et al, Beginning Python:

     You can now restore the pickled data. If you like, close your Python interpreter and open a new instance, to convince yourself […]
4. (historical) To pour brine over a person after flogging them, as a method of punishment.
   • 1756, Thomas Thistlewood, diary, quoted in 2001, Glyne A. Griffith, Caribbean Cultural Identities, Bucknell University Press (?ISBN), page 38:

     On Wednesday 26 May, […] I had [an enslaved man] flogged and pickled and then made Hector shit in his mouth. […] In July, […] Gave [another enslaved man] a moderate whipping, pickled him well, made Hector shit in his mouth, […]

   • 2016, Christopher P. Magra, Poseidon's Curse: British Naval Impressment and Atlantic Origins of the American Revolution, Cambridge University Press (?ISBN), page 70:

     Naval seamen could also be keel-hauled, ducked, pickled, and flogged around the fleet.

     [elsewhere, page 93, the book explains:] A pickled man had his flogged back washed with vinegar.

Derived terms

• pickled
• pickling

Translations

Etymology 2

Perhaps from Scottish pickle, apparently from pick +? -le (diminutive suffix). Compare Scots pickil.

Noun

pickle (plural pickles)

1. (Northern England, Scotland) A kernel; a grain (of salt, sugar, etc.)
2. (Northern England, Scotland) A small or indefinite quantity or amount (of something); a little, a bit, a few. Usually in partitive construction, frequently without "of"; a single grain or kernel of wheat, barley, oats, sand or dust.
   • 1881, Robert Louis Stevenson, "Thrawn Janet"

     […] ill things are like guid—they baith come bit by bit, a pickle at a time […]

Verb

pickle (third-person singular simple present pickles, present participle pickling, simple past and past participle pickled)

1. (Northern England, Scotland, transitive, intransitive) To eat sparingly.
2. (Northern England, Scotland, transitive, intransitive) To pilfer.

Anagrams

• pelick

French

Etymology

English pickle

Noun

pickle m (plural pickles)

1. pickle (kind of chutney popular in Britain)

English

Etymology

From Middle English pinchen, from Old French *pinchier, pincer (“to pinch”), from Vulgar Latin *pinci?re (“to puncture, pinch”), from possible merger of *puncti?re (“a puncture, sting”), from Latin puncti? (“a puncture, prick”) and *picc?re (“to strike, sting”), from Frankish *pikk?n, from Proto-Germanic *pikk?n? (“to pick, peck, prick”).

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /p?nt?/
• Rhymes: -?nt?

Verb

pinch (third-person singular simple present pinches, present participle pinching, simple past and past participle pinched)

1. To squeeze a small amount of a person's skin and flesh, making it hurt.

   The children were scolded for pinching each other.

   This shoe pinches my foot.

2. To squeeze between the thumb and forefinger.
3. To squeeze between two objects.
4. (slang, transitive) To steal, usually something inconsequential.

   Someone has pinched my handkerchief!
5. (slang, transitive) To arrest or capture.
6. (horticulture) To cut shoots or buds of a plant in order to shape the plant, or to improve its yield.
7. (nautical) To sail so close-hauled that the sails begin to flutter.
8. (hunting) To take hold; to grip, as a dog does.
9. (obsolete, intransitive) To be stingy or covetous; to live sparingly.

   (Can we find and add a quotation of Gower to this entry?)

   • 1788, Benjamin Franklin (attributed), Paper

     the wretch whom avarice bids to pinch and spare

10. To seize; to grip; to bite; said of animals.
11. (figuratively) To cramp; to straiten; to oppress; to starve.

    to be pinched for money

    • c. 1610?, Walter Raleigh, A Discourse of War

      want of room […] which pincheth the whole nation

    • 1902, William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lecture 2:

      The Christian also spurns the pinched and mumping sick-room attitude, and the lives of saints are full of a kind of callousness to diseased conditions of body which probably no other human records show.

12. To move, as a railroad car, by prying the wheels with a pinch.
13. (obsolete) To complain or find fault.
    • 1809, Alexander Chalmers ed. The Works of the English Poets, from Cahucer to Cowper, Vol. 1, modern rendering of poem imputed to Geoffrey Chaucer, "A Ballad which Chaucer made in Praise or rather Dispraise of Women for their Doubleness":

      Therefore who so them accuse

      Of any double entencion,

      To speake, rowne, other to muse,

      To pinch at their condicion,

      All is but false collusion,

      I dare rightwell the sothe express,

      They have no better protection,

      But shrowd them vnder doubleness.

Derived terms

• pinch off
• pinch out
• pinch a loaf

Translations

Noun

pinch (plural pinches)

1. The action of squeezing a small amount of a person's skin and flesh, making it hurt.
2. A close compression of anything with the fingers.

   I gave the leather of the sofa a pinch, gauging the texture.

3. A small amount of powder or granules, such that the amount could be held between fingertip and thumb tip.
4. An awkward situation of some kind (especially money or social) which is difficult to escape.
   • 1955, Rex Stout, "Die Like a Dog", in Three Witnesses, October 1994 Bantam edition, ?ISBN, page 171:

     It took nerve and muscle both to carry the body out and down the stairs to the lower hall, but he damn well had to get it out of his place and away from his door, and any of those four could have done it in a pinch, and it sure was a pinch.

5. A metal bar used as a lever for lifting weights, rolling wheels, etc.
6. An organic herbal smoke additive.
7. (physics) A magnetic compression of an electrically-conducting filament.
8. The narrow part connecting the two bulbs of an hourglass.
   • 2001, Terry Pratchett: Thief of Time:

     It looked like an hourglass, but all those little glittering shapes tumbling through the pinch were seconds.

9. (slang) An arrest.

Derived terms

Descendants

• ? Japanese: ??? (pinchi)

Translations