Other forms: trembling, trembled, trembles
To tremble is to shake in small quick movements you cannot stop. Hands tremble in the cold, a voice trembles just before someone cries, leaves tremble in a breeze.
Tremble is finer and smaller than shake, and it comes from inside you — fear, cold, exhaustion, rage. It takes WITH: trembling with cold, trembling with anger. There is a noun too, "a tremble in her voice", though the medical word for a shaking hand is a tremor. Tremble also carries an older, weightier sense of dread: "I tremble to think what he'll say when he finds out." Shiver belongs mostly to cold, quiver is lighter and faster, and tremble sits between them.
1verbtrembleTo shake with small quick movements, especially from fear, cold or weakness.
“His hands trembled as he opened the letter.”
2verbshake(of a thing) To shake slightly.
“The whole floor trembled when the train went past.”
3nounshakingA slight shaking movement.
“There was a tremble in her voice she could not hide.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
Also accepted in games: shiver
Tremble came through Old French trembler from Latin tremulō, itself from tremō, "to quiver, to shake". Ancient Greek had the same verb, τρέμω, and both go back to a Proto-Indo-European root *trem-. It is a word that sounds like what it means, and has done for thousands of years.
Proto-Indo-European
*trem-
Latin
tremulō
Old French
trembler
Middle English
tremblen
English, today
tremble
From Middle English tremblen, from Old French trembler, from Latin tremulō, ultimately from Latin tremō (“quiver, shake”). Cognate with Ancient Greek τρέμω.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA