cringe vs dodge

cringe

noun
  • An act or disposition of servile obeisance. 

  • A gesture or posture of cringing (recoiling or shrinking). 

  • A crick (“painful muscular cramp or spasm of some part of the body”). 

  • Awkwardness or embarrassment which causes an onlooker to cringe; cringeworthiness. 

verb
  • To experience an inward feeling of disgust, embarrassment, or fear; (by extension) to feel very embarrassed. 

  • To cower, flinch, recoil, shrink, or tense, as in disgust, embarrassment, or fear. 

  • To bow or crouch in servility. 

  • To act in an obsequious or servile manner. 

adj
  • Inducing awkwardness, embarrassment, or secondhand embarrassment; cringemaking, cringeworthy, cringy. 

dodge

noun
  • An act of dodging. 

  • A trick, evasion or wile. (Now mainly in the expression tax dodge.) 

  • A line of work. 

adj
  • Dodgy. 

verb
  • To follow by dodging, or suddenly shifting from place to place. 

  • To avoid (something) by moving suddenly out of the way. 

  • To decrease the exposure for certain areas of an image in order to make them darker (compare burn). 

  • To avoid; to sidestep. 

How often have the words cringe and dodge occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )