Who Made Cringe

Where did cringe come from?

If you think about the way your body involuntarily flinches or bends in those situations, you won’t be surprised to learn that the word cringe can be traced back to the Old English word cringan, meaning “give way, fall (in battle), become bent.” That’s exactly what your body does when you cringe!

When did cringe start?

Use of cringey dates back to at least 1986. It features cringe plus the common adjective suffix -y and is a synonym for cringeworthy. Cringey can be found on 1990s Usenet groups and in the early days of Twitter in the mid-2000s. It also made notable appearances on The Rachel Maddow Show and HuffPost in the late 2000s.