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crankle

verb /ˈkɹæŋkəl/

  1. To bend, turn, or wind.

    Hath not so many turnes, nor crankling nookes as shee.

    Meander, who is said so intricate to bee,
  2. To break into bends, turns, or angles; to crinkle.

    Old Vaga's stream […] drew her humid train aslope, / Crankling her banks.

Where it comes from

From crank + -le. Coined by Michael Drayton in 1596. According to the Poly-Olbion project, "Drayton probably derived ‘crankling’ from ‘crank’, a word which had its first recorded usage in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (1594) where it describes a hare which ‘crankes and crosses with a thousand doubles’."

Adapted from the Wiktionary entry crankle (CC BY-SA 4.0).

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