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winkle

UK/ˈwɪŋkəl/US/ˈwɪŋkəl/
verbC2Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #9,720 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: winkles

To winkle is to get something out with difficulty and patience. Winkle it out, winkle out the truth, winkle him out.

It nearly always takes out, and the patience is the point — winkling is extracting something reluctant bit by bit. The image is the shellfish: a winkle is picked out of its shell with a pin, which is fiddly and slow, and that is exactly where the verb comes from.

Definitions of winkle

  1. 1verbwinkleTo get something out with difficulty and patience.C2

    “It took me an hour to winkle the truth out of my son about the broken window.”

winkle is a patient extracting.

Remember it

w-INK-le → working the last INK out

You work the last of the ink out of the pen, slowly, and in the end it comes.

hooks ontoink

Where it comes from

an ellipsis of periwinkle.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire

Practise this word

winkle in the wild

  • A winkle squeeze is a rare squeeze/endplay in contract bridge in which a trick is offered to the defenders but whichever wins the trick is then endplayed.

    Winkle squeeze

  • The winkle squeeze was named and analyzed by Terence Reese in Master Play in Contract Bridge.

    Winkle squeeze

  • Tiggy-winkle has been described as one of Potter's most positive creations.

    The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle

  • Tiggy-winkle became a popular character and the subject of considerable merchandise over the decades including nursery ware and porcelain figurines.

    The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle

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.