pinched

pinched

1. simple past and past participle of pinch

pinched (comparative more pinched, superlative most pinched)

1. Very thin, as if drawn together.
   • 1855, Frederick Douglass, chapter 3, in My Bondage and My Freedom. , New York, Auburn, N.Y.: Miller, Orton & Mulligan , →OCLC:

     Want of food was my chief trouble the first summer at my old master's. Oysters and clams would do very well, with an occasional supply of bread, but they soon failed in the absence of bread. I speak but the simple truth, when I say, I have often been so pinched with hunger, that I have fought with the dog—"Old Nep"—for the smallest crumbs that fell from the kitchen table, and have been glad when I won a single crumb in the combat.

   • 1897, Edwin Arlington Robinson, “Aaron Stark”, in Children of the Night:

     His thin, pinched mouth was nothing but a mark […]

   • 2003, J. K. Rowling, chapter 1, in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix:

     He was a skinny, black-haired, bespectacled boy who had the pinched, slightly unhealthy look of someone who has grown a lot in a short space of time.

2. (of a person or their face) Tense and pale from cold, worry, or hunger.
3. Financially hurt or damaged.
4. Compressed.
   • 2010, Clifford D. Stark, Elizabeth Shimer Bowers, Living with Sports Injuries, →ISBN, page 40:

     If your sport makes you prone to violent neck motions, you are at risk for a pinched nerve. A pinched nerve occurs when a cervical disc ruptures, and the jellylike material from inside the disc presses on a nerve.