different between pinch vs jot

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

English

Etymology

From Latin i?ta, from Ancient Greek ???? (iôta). Doublet of iota.

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /d??t/
• (General American) IPA^(key): /d??t/
• Rhymes: -?t

Noun

jot (plural jots)

1. Iota; the smallest letter or stroke of any writing.
   • 1904, Bliss Carman, “Christmas Eve at St. Kavin’s” in Pipes of Pan: Songs from a Northern Garden, Boston: L.C. Page, p. 107,^[1]

     Of old, men said, “Sin not;

     By every line and jot

     Ye shall abide; man’s heart is false and vile.”

2. A small amount, bit; the smallest amount.

   He didn't care a jot for his work.

   • 1719, Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, London: W. Taylor, 3rd edition, p. 159,^[2]

     After this I spent a great deal of Time and Pains to make me an Umbrella; I was indeed in great want of one, and had a great mind to make one; I had seen them made in the Brasils, where they are very useful in the great Heats which are there: And I felt the Heats every jot as great here, and greater too, being nearer the Equinox […]

   • 1920, Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Chapter 8,^[3]

     “What does that matter? Arsenic would put poor Emily out of the way just as well as strychnine. If I’m convinced he did it, it doesn’t matter a jot to me how he did it.”

3. (obsolete) A moment, an instant.
   • 1595, Edmund Spenser, Amoretti in Kenneth J. Larson (ed.), Amoretti and Epithalamion: A Critical Edition, Tempe, AZ: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1997, Sonnet LVII, p. 91,^[4]

     So weake my powres, so sore my wounds appeare,

     that wonder is how I should liue a iot,

     seeing my hart through launched euery where

     with thousand arrowes, which your eies haue shot:

   • 1728, Lewis Theobald, Double Falshood: or, the Distrest Lovers, London: J. Watts, Act I, Scene 1, p. 12,^[5]

     Making my Death familiar to my Tongue

     Digs not my Grave one Jot before the Date.

4. A brief and hurriedly written note.
   • 1662, Henry More, An Antidote Against Atheism, Book II, A Collection of Several Philosophical Writings of Dr. Henry More, p. 53:

     "I say, it is no uneven jot, to pass from the more faint and obscure examples of Spermatical life to the more considerable effects of general Motion in Minerals, Metalls, and sundry Meteors ..."

   • 1920, Robert Nichols, “Sonnets to Aurelia, IV” in Aurelia and Other Poems, London: Chatto & Windus, p. 29,^[6]

     “Lover,” you say; “how beautiful that is,

     That little word!” […]

     Yes, it is beautiful. I have marked it long,

     Long in my dusty head its jot secreted,

     Yet my heart never knew this word a song

     Till in the night softly by you repeated.

Synonyms

• (small amount): see also Thesaurus:modicum.

Derived terms

• every jot and tittle
• not a jot or tittle

Translations

See also

• tittle

Verb

jot (third-person singular simple present jots, present participle jotting, simple past and past participle jotted)

1. (usually with "down") To write quickly.

   Tell me your order, so I can jot it down.

Derived terms

• jot down

Translations

Anagrams

• OJT, OTJ

Central Franconian

Alternative forms

• jott (westernmost Ripuarian)
• got (northern Moselle Franconian)
• gut (southern Moselle Franconian)

Etymology

From Old High German guod, northern variant of guot, from Proto-Germanic *g?daz.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /jo?t/

Adjective

jot (masculine jode, feminine jot, comparative besser, superlative et beste)

1. (most of Ripuarian) good

Ingrian

Etymology

From Proto-Finnic *jo. Cognate to Finnish jotta.

Conjunction

jot

1. so that, in order that

Luxembourgish

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /jo?t/, /?o?t/

Verb

jot

1. inflection of joen:
   1. second-person plural present indicative
   2. second-person plural imperative

Rayón Zoque

Noun

jot

1. bird

Derived terms

• jot?une

See also

• jotjot

References

• Harrison, Roy; B. de Harrison, Margaret; López Juárez, Francisco; Ordoñes, Cosme (1984) Vocabulario zoque de Rayón (Serie de diccionarios y vocabularios indígenas Mariano Silva y Aceves; 28)?^[7] (in Spanish), México, D.F.: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano, page 10