wring
/rɪŋ
/- Gently wipe away all traces of the cleanser with a face washer wrung out in tepid water, rinsing at least twice more in warm water.
- Victoria wrung out the washcloth into the basin and hung it on its peg.
- We would walk off after each scene; literally wringing our shirts dry of sweat.
Synonyms
- Viney hypothesizes that as the raw liquid silk squeezes through the duct, water is wrung out of the protein and calcium is added.
- It was the sort of rain that resembled water being wrung out of a dishcloth - droplets the size of marbles and musty-smelling to boot.
- Not only could fat be wrung out of the bread, there were dark foreign objects within its matrix, which upon further investigation turned out to be little globules of maple syrup.
- Her hands, which had formerly been clasped in her lap, were now being wrung nervously, her fingers gripping and squeezing those of the other hand and vice-versa.
- Ice let go of his hand to wring hers rather nervously,
- For those readers who are accustomed to more detailed explications, the chapters will read less as case studies and more as efforts to wring from Freud's original texts some interpretive potential.
- He actually bends over the steering wheel as if to wring an extra couple of miles out of the car.
- Guiseley wrung one final effort out of Henry before the final whistle and all in all a draw was a fair result.
Synonyms
- It's operated by a centrifugal clutch and gives the buggy a far better top speed than a single geared model, and gives the engine a break from not wringing its own neck, trying to hit top speed with only one gear.
- Back at the peg, its neck will be wrung to kill it.
- Tobie shrieked, almost wringing her best friend's neck.
- My heart felt like it was being wrung every time he spoke.
- The narrative material is obviously shaped in order to wring the audience's melodramatic heart.
- The reason I wrote and posted this chapter, even though it wrung at my heart while I did so, was because writing - in any form - makes me feel better.
Synonyms
- Do you go steady with the brush for very long before you give it a wring?
- Most of all I like that you can roll it up in wet clothing, give it a wring, and it removes maybe 50% of the water before hanging the clothes to dry.
Phrases
wring one's hands
Origin
Old English wringan (verb), of West Germanic origin; related to Dutch wringen, also to wrong.
wrong from Old English:
An Old English word from Old Norse rangr ‘awry, unjust’, which first meant ‘crooked, curved, or twisted’ and is related to wring (Old English). Until the 17th century the wr- would have been pronounced, and there was obviously something about the sound that suggested the idea of twisting—many English words beginning with wr-, such as wrist, writhe, and wreathe (all OE), contain the notion. Although to get the wrong end of the stick now means ‘to misunderstand something’, the original sense seems to have been ‘to come off worse’. The example in The Swell's Night Guide, a guide to London low life published in 1846, gives an idea of what was wrong with the ‘wrong end’: ‘Which of us had hold of the crappy…end of the stick?’ The proverb two wrongs don't make a right dates from the late 18th century. The Hungarian-born psychiatrist Thomas Szasz summed up the feelings of many when he said in 1973: ‘Two wrongs don't make a right, but they make a good excuse.’