shrivel

UK/ˈʃɹɪvəl/US/ˈʃɹɪvəl/

verbB2+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #11,369 of 15,258leans spoken

Other forms: shriveled, shrivelled, shrivels, shriveling, shrivelling

To shrivel is to dry up and wrinkle into something smaller. The leaves shrivelled, shrivel in the heat, a shrivelled apple.

The wrinkling is what marks it out: the thing loses water and the skin has too much surface for what is left inside. It is used of hopes and of confidence too, and shrivel up is the usual form of the phrasal verb.

Definitions of shrivel

1verbshrivelTo dry up and wrinkle into something smaller.B2+
“The grapes left out in the sun shrivelled into raisins.”

shrivel is a drying.

Where it comes from

Probably from a Scandinavian source; a Swedish dialect word skryvla means to wrinkle.

Proto-Germanic
*skrinkwaną — to shrivel, shrink
English, today
shrivel

Built from

shriveled · English — shrivelled
*skrimpaną · Proto-Germanic — to shrink

First recorded as shriveled (“shrivelled”), probably of gmq - origin related to dialectal Swedish skryvla (“to wrinkle, shrivel”); perhaps ultimately related to Proto-Germanic skrinkwaną (“to shrivel, shrink”) or skrimpaną (“to shrink”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire

Practise this word

shrivel in the wild

In hot weather they shrivel up to conserve moisture, but open up again when the wet returns.
Hymenophyllum nephrophyllum
New leaves quickly sprout after fall and winter rains, but during the dry summer months these typically shrivel.
Isoetes tegetiformans
Other reports submitted to ENZA have mentioned russet and shrivel, bitter pit, and internal browning.
Envy (apple)
The beans are strung on the thread and hung, usually behind a wood stove, until they shrivel, giving the appearance of "leather britches".
Shucky beans

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

shrivel up

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