scrouge

English

Alternative forms

• scrooge, scrowdge, scrudge

Etymology

Uncertain. Possibly related to shrug.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /skɹaʊd͡ʒ/

Verb

scrouge (third-person singular simple present scrouges, present participle scrouging, simple past and past participle scrouged)

1. (UK, dialect and US, colloquial, transitive) To crowd; to squeeze.
   • 1884 December 10, Mark Twain [pseudonym; Samuel Langhorne Clemens], The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: (Tom Sawyer’s Comrade) […], London: Chatto & Windus, […], →OCLC:

     Well, pretty soon the whole town was there, squirming and scrouging and pushing and shoving to get at the window and have a look […]

   • 1983, Judson R. Landis, Sociology: concepts and characteristics:

     I look for veiled eyes or bodies scrouged into a seat in an alien world.

   • 2001, Aileen Kilgore Henderson, Stateside Soldier: Life in the Women's Army Corps, 1944-1945, page 12:

     We stayed up till eleven, sitting on the stairs, on the floor, and scrouged into the day room, surrounded by stacks of GI clothes.

Translations

to crowd, to squeeze

• Russian: толпи́ться (ru) n (tolpítʹsja)

Part or all of this entry has been imported from the 1913 edition of Webster’s Dictionary, which is now free of copyright and hence in the public domain. The imported definitions may be significantly out of date, and any more recent senses may be completely missing.
(See the entry for “scrouge”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.)

Anagrams

• scourge