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Writhe wound its way to us from the Old English verb wrīthan, meaning “to twist,” and that ancestral meaning lives on in the word’s current uses, most of which have to do with twists of one kind or another. Among the oldest of these uses is the meaning “to twist into coils or folds,” but in modern use writhing is more often about the physical contortions of one suffering from debilitating pain or attempting to remove oneself from a tight grasp (as, say, a snake from a hawk’s talons). The word is also not infrequently applied to the twisting bodies of dancers. The closest relation of writhe in modern English lacks any of the painful connotations often present in writhe: wreath comes from Old English writha, which shares an ancestor with wrīthan.
Examples of writhe in a Sentence
Sara Holdren, Vulture, 11 Mar. 2025
And inmates have been seen to writhe and struggle when the latest method, nitrogen gas, is used to suffocate them as it is pushed through a mask.
—CBS News, 7 Mar. 2025
Miller skated off the ice and writhed in pain on the bench.
—Peter Baugh, The Athletic, 19 Mar. 2025
The Provincetown Princess was cutting through a plankton path: a wide swath of ocean where fish were feeding, thousands of fish, even millions of fish, writhing silvery bodies in the dark water, savagely frenzied activity of a kind that Cassidy had never seen before.
—Joyce Carol Oates, The New Yorker, 16 Mar. 2025
See All Example Sentences for writhe
Cite this Entry
“Writhe.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/writhe. Accessed 14 Apr. 2025.
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