cringe vs forge

cringe

verb
  • To act in an obsequious or servile manner. 

  • 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. 

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

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

  • An act or disposition of servile obeisance. 

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

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

forge

verb
  • To form or create with concerted effort. 

  • To make falsely; to produce, as that which is untrue or not genuine; to fabricate. 

  • To move forward heavily and slowly (originally as a ship); to advance gradually but steadily; to proceed towards a goal in the face of resistance or difficulty. 

  • To create a forgery of; to make a counterfeit item of; to copy or imitate unlawfully. 

  • To advance, move or act with an abrupt increase in speed or energy. 

  • To shape a metal by heating and hammering. 

noun
  • A Web-based collaborative platform for developing and sharing software. 

  • A furnace or hearth where metals are heated prior to hammering them into shape. 

  • A workshop in which metals are shaped by heating and hammering them. 

  • The act of beating or working iron or steel. 

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