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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
cripple
I.noun
COLLOCATIONS FROM OTHER ENTRIES
a damaging/crippling strike (=having a bad effect on an industry)
▪ The company now faces the prospect of a crippling strike.
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ ADJECTIVE
emotional
▪ Together they inadvertently ensured that their four children would be little more than emotional cripples.
▪ But Howard's performance also suggests that Higgins is an emotional cripple.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Billy went on weeping as he contemplated the cripples and their boss.
▪ But against that was the sudden action of the cripple at the bridge.
▪ But no - for I am not a cripple, I have no debility, and something other than myself is doing this.
▪ He says it's sad that the thieves are so cowardly that they can't face a cripple.
▪ He stood in the darkroom with another trainee, Dale Fitzke, a cripple.
▪ She was herself a cripple, constantly in need of the sort of attention her husband had regularly given her in the evenings.
▪ The cripple choked and pushed the plate away.
▪ Which of course reminds me of the blind man and cripple riding happily together across our green countryside on that rickety train.
II.verb
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ NOUN
economy
▪ High interest rates are crippling and an unstable economy can produce them at any time.
life
▪ Taken to extremes, what begins as an anxiety may develop into a full-blown phobia, crippling the life of the sufferer.
▪ His back is broken, and, barring a miracle, he's crippled for life.
▪ She left one dead, one born and two crippled for life, one way or the other.
▪ One bullet in the wrong place can cripple you for life or send your blood gushing on to the pavement.
▪ A fight ensued which left one man dead, one crippled for life and several with lasting scars.
▪ Somewhere they knew they had crippled her life, and their own responses were inadequate.
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ Asia's economy has been crippled by inflation.
▪ Richard was crippled in the bombing of 1984, and had been in a wheelchair ever since.
▪ The accident crippled her for life.
▪ The driver, who had been taking drugs, crippled the young woman for life.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Our tendency to reward failure has literally crippled our efforts to help the poor.
▪ There's only one way you can cripple a bad scientist, and that's to demonstrate how bad his science is.
▪ Thus, under its definitions, no one is crippled and no one is handicapped in this society.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Cripple

Cripple \Crip"ple\ (kr[i^]p"p'l), n. [OE. cripel, crepel, crupel, AS. crypel (akin to D. kreuple, G. kr["u]ppel, Dan. kr["o]bling, Icel. kryppill), prop., one that can not walk, but must creep, fr. AS. cre['o]pan to creep. See Creep.] One who creeps, halts, or limps; one who has lost, or never had, the use of a limb or limbs; a lame person; hence, one who is partially disabled.

I am a cripple in my limbs; but what decays are in my mind, the reader must determine.
--Dryden.

Cripple

Cripple \Crip"ple\, (kr[i^]p"p'l), n. [Local. U. S.]

  1. Swampy or low wet ground, often covered with brush or with thickets; bog.

    The flats or cripple land lying between high- and low-water lines, and over which the waters of the stream ordinarily come and go.
    --Pennsylvania Law Reports.

  2. A rocky shallow in a stream; -- a lumberman's term.

Cripple

Cripple \Crip"ple\ (kr[i^]p"p'l), a. Lame; halting. [R.] ``The cripple, tardy-gaited night.''
--Shak.

Cripple

Cripple \Crip"ple\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Crippled (-p'ld); p. pr. & vb. n. Crippling (-pl?ng).]

  1. To deprive of the use of a limb, particularly of a leg or foot; to lame.

    He had crippled the joints of the noble child.
    --Sir W. Scott.

  2. To deprive of strength, activity, or capability for service or use; to disable; to deprive of resources; as, to be financially crippled.

    More serious embarrassments . . . were crippling the energy of the settlement in the Bay.
    --Palfrey.

    An incumbrance which would permanently cripple the body politic.
    --Macaulay.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
cripple

Old English crypel, related to cryppan "to crook, bend," from Proto-Germanic *krupilaz (cognates: Old Frisian kreppel, Middle Dutch cropel, German krüppel, Old Norse kryppill). Possibly also related to Old English creopan "to creep" (creopere, literally "creeper," was another Old English word for "crippled person").

cripple

mid-13c., "to move slowly," from cripple (n.). Meaning "make a cripple of, lame" is from early 14c. Related: Crippled; crippling.

Wiktionary
cripple
  1. crippled. n. 1 (context often offensive English) a person who has severely impaired physical ability because of deformation, injury, or amputation of parts of the body. 2 A shortened wooden stud or brace used to construct the portion of a wall above a door or above and below a window. 3 (context dialect Southern US except Louisiana English) scrapple. 4 (cx among lumbermen English) A rocky shallow in a stream. v

  2. 1 to make someone a cripple; to cause someone to get a physical disability 2 (context figuratively English) to damage seriously; to destroy 3 to release a product (especially a computer program) with reduced functionality, in some cases, making the item essentially worthless.

WordNet
cripple
  1. n. someone whose legs are disabled

  2. v. deprive of strength or efficiency; make useless or worthless; "This measure crippled our efforts"; "Their behavior stultified the boss's hard work" [syn: stultify]

  3. deprive of the use of a limb, especially a leg; "The accident has crippled her for life" [syn: lame]

Gazetteer
Wikipedia
Cripple

A cripple is a person or animal with a physical disability, particularly one who is unable to walk because of an injury or illness. The word was recorded as early as 950 AD, and derives from the Proto-Germanic krupilaz. The German and Dutch words Krüppel and kreupel are cognates.

By the 1970s, the word generally came to be regarded as pejorative when used for people with disabilities. Cripple is also a transitive verb, meaning "cause a disability or inability".

Cripple (disambiguation)

A cripple is a person or animal with a physical disability. Now pejorative when referring to a person.

Cripple may also refer to:

Software

  • Crippleware, a type of shareware or freeware that lacks full functionality

Mass media

  • Cripple Clarence Lofton (1887–1957), blues artist
  • " Crippled Inside", a 1971 song by John Lennon on the album Imagine
  • The Crippled Masters, a 1979 kung-fu film
  • The Cripple of Inishmaan, a 1997 Irish play
  • Crippled Lucifer, a 1998 album by Burning Witch
  • " Cripple Fight", a 2001 episode of South Park
  • Hooky the Cripple, a 2002 novel by Chopper Read
  • Cripple Crow, a 2005 album by Devendra Banhart
  • Cripple Need Cane, a rock band from Los Angeles

See also

  • Cripple Creek (disambiguation)

Usage examples of "cripple".

If he was willing to take some risks, he could probably put together an attack that would have a shot at crippling the enemy amphib forces, but if he made one wrong step the results would make the loss of the Gridley look like a minor lapse in judgment.

The ritual would provide a cathartic release for antisocial and antiauthoritarian impulses, either exhausting those persons, crippling them, or removing them entirely via death.

In nightmares and in prophecy Apollonius had seen him disguising himself as a crippled beggar during the day, so that no one would take undue notice of him, then changing shape in the dusk and stalking the Ephesians by night, a great monster half-wolf, half-man, a lycanthrope who reveled in the killings.

That was their own little secret, their special secret, her and Uncle Jake, the crippled teenager and the arteriosclerotic old man.

Tom, Bud, Arv, and Hank made a careful examination of the crippled craft.

Jack Shannon, his wily roommate, had spent their nights at barrelhouse piano saloons on the South Side, listening to musicians with names like Pine Top Smith, Cripple Clarence Lofton, Speckled Red, and Cow Cow Davenport pound the keys on their uprights.

For a Navy Yard captain swamped by destroyers, carriers, even battleships crowding in with kamikaze damage, an old crippled submarine was a low-priority customer.

If by some remote chance he succeeded in crippling the mare, the rest of the Beja aggagiers would be upon them in the next instant, their long blades bared.

The young man had since learned the cripple was not only the most skilled mog-ur of all the clans, but that he had a kind and gentle heart beneath his austere visage.

The creation of a new Department of Homeland Security had, theoretically, set up a central clearinghouse for all threat-related information, but the size of the newsuperagency had crippled it from the get-go.

The creation of a new Department of Homeland Security had, theoretically, set up a central clearinghouse for all threat-related information, but the size of the new superagency had crippled it from the get-go.

Yet every Great Cycle the earth shifts, killing and crippling more adults than there are cubs to replace them.

The crippled Sealon attack craft, left behind in a low orbit when its two companions had raised their altitudes and shifted to polar orbits, had long since succumbed to drag, spiraling ever lower until it deorbited and screamed down through the atmosphere, a brilliant fireball, its remains impacting on a large, uninhabited island near the equator.

Fisher was actually a very powerful personnot a drooly, not handicapped, not a cripple, but the captain and commander of a delicate mission to O-Zone.

When Eccles turns to Harry to guffaw conspiratorially after this dig, bitterness cripples his laugh, turns his lips in tightly, so his small jawed head shows its teeth like a skull.