from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
intransitive verb To be very frugal and sparing.
from The Century Dictionary.
Scanty; narrow; deficient; contracted.
noun A niggard; a pinching miser.
To pinch or scant; limit closely; be sparing in the food, clothes, money, etc., of; deal sparingly with; straiten.
To be sparing in; narrow, straiten, stint, or contract, especially through a niggard or sparing use or allowance of something; make too small, short, or scanty; limit: as, to scrimp a coat, or the cloth for making it.
To be parsimonious or miserly: as, to save and scrimp.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
adjective Short; scanty; curtailed.
transitive verb To make too small or short; to limit or straiten; to put on short allowance; to scant; to contract; to shorten.
noun U.S. A pinching miser; a niggard.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
noun A pinching miser; a niggard.
verb transitive To make too small or short; to scant; to contract; to shorten.
verb transitive To limit or straiten; to put on shortallowance.
verb intransitive To be frugal.
adjective Short; scanty; curtailed.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
verb subsist on a meager allowance
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
[Perhaps of Scandinavian origin; akin to Swedish skrympa, to shrink.]
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
This definition is lacking an etymology or has an incomplete etymology. You can help Wiktionary by giving it a proper etymology.
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Examples
Another are where they scrimp is on the safety and training of their own personnel.
I say "largely" because campaigns found ways to scrimp and save by renting cars across the state line, a minor dodge which seems quite quaint in today's post-Citizens United decision milieu of anything goes spending.
I say "largely" because campaigns found ways to scrimp and save by renting cars across the state line, a minor dodge which seems quite quaint in today's post-Citizens United decision milieu of anything goes spending.
missanthropist commented on the word scrimp
Southern/urban devolution of 'shrimp'.
April 20, 2009