cringe vs shrinker

cringe

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. 

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. 

shrinker

noun
  • One who shrinks or recoils. 

  • Something that makes something else shrink. 

  • A psychiatrist; a head-shrinker. 

  • Something that itself shrinks. 

  • A sock-like article used to compress a stump remaining after amputation. 

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