(v. i.) To make a prolonged sharp grating or squeaking sound, as by the friction of hard substances; as, shoes creak.
(v. t.) To produce a creaking sound with.
(n.) The sound produced by anything that creaks; a creaking.
Example Sentences:
(1) The game also makes a lot of mileage out of building up razor-sharp tension, reducing the soundtrack to footfalls and creaking doors and then having horrific monsters amble into view as though this is the natural state of things.
(2) The hope is that they can drive 10-year Spanish bond yields out of the danger zone, take the pressure off the creaking Spanish banking system, and thus avoid the need for Madrid to seek formal help from the EU and the IMF.
(3) Your knees creak, your back aches and your fleshy bits droop more than they used to.
(4) Ending the unprecedented financial squeeze and returning to this historical average seems essential if we are to ensure that our health service is fit for the future.” “For almost six years, funding for both health and social care has not kept pace with the level of need.There have been many more hospital admissions, GP appointments and A&E attendances each year, so we should not be surprised that the NHS appears to be creaking under the pressure.
(5) Jesús Navas was a formidable opponent for the creaking Patrice Evra.
(6) Refugee crisis: Germany creaks under strain of open door policy Read more The DIW’s study based its calculations on 1 million refugees arriving this year, a similar number next year, and half a million each year until the end of 2018.
(7) Julian Savulescu , professor of practical ethics at Oxford University, said: "Venter is creaking open the most profound door in humanity's history, potentially peeking into its destiny.
(8) "I struggled, I tried to push him away, and it was only the fact that there was someone walking along the corridor and the floors creaked that he stopped and I managed to get away.
(9) The system is creaking at the seams even with the tiny number of current trial claimants.
(10) The Liberal Democrat business secretary might just have tried to go all the way – stretching creaking rules designed to protect "media plurality" – and so block News Corporation's proposed £8bn takeover of BSkyB amid worries about the power and influence of Murdoch's companies in the UK.
(11) And ageing is certainly a theme in the chat between live music (Norah Jones, Jamie Cullum) and guests (Sir Ian McKellan), with Wogan referring to himself as "an old cripple" and making jokes about creaking knees.
(12) For democracies, saddled with the creaking machinery of checks and balances, slow, incremental change is possible – but firefighting in a crisis is much harder.
(13) Bus and train operator National Express today won approval from investors to go ahead with a £360m rights issue designed to repair its overstretched balance sheet, creaking under debts of more than £1bn.
(14) Creaking joints aside, the Ministry of Silly Walks sketch is playing a key role in the promotion for the reunion.
(15) Although few in the Delta have noticed it yet, the freshwater of the Nile – which has enabled Egypt to survive as a unified state longer than any other territory on earth – is creaking under the strain of this population boom.
(16) Fifa 15 takes much better advantage of the PS4 and Xbox One’s number-crunching power, while finally ditching the legacy code from old consoles which could still be found in creaking away within Fifa 14's innards.
(17) And the “system”, the formula that has enabled so many people to successfully summit and the safety procedures that underpinned it, has started to creak.
(18) While a paying climber might travel through the treacherous icefall – a constantly moving, creaking, crevasse-riddled outflow of the Khumbu glacier – as few as four times, Sherpa climbers might make 30 or 40 journeys, carrying loads of oxygen, tents, food, water and fuel to the higher camps, a system that has evolved in the commercial era to give people who might not be the strongest, or the most experienced, the best chance of making it to the top.
(19) Accelerating wage inequality, together with a rise in economic insecurity, would sharpen the need to bolster our working-age welfare system at a time when it's already creaking and has few political friends.
(20) There were also rumours in 2007 that her marriage was creaking, and last August it was revealed that Douglas, with whom she has two children, had stage IV throat cancer.
Croak
Definition:
(v. i.) To make a low, hoarse noise in the throat, as a frog, a raven, or a crow; hence, to make any hoarse, dismal sound.
(v. i.) To complain; especially, to grumble; to forebode evil; to utter complaints or forebodings habitually.
(v. t.) To utter in a low, hoarse voice; to announce by croaking; to forebode; as, to croak disaster.
(n.) The coarse, harsh sound uttered by a frog or a raven, or a like sound.
Example Sentences:
(1) The first two experiments imply that stimulation of the skin of the trunk initiates the release croak; Experiments 3 and 4 suggest that an internal afferent source inhibits the release croak and might mediate an important aspect of receptivity in female frogs.
(2) The cathartic moment, in which the king realises he's OK and lovable just as he is, was wonderful for the film-makers to discover, and has been wonderful for worldwide audiences ever since (and the king doesn't die… he merely "croaks").
(3) Poppies in the long grass, frogs croaking for mates, wasps droning lazily at the window, tomatoes and strawberries ripening in garden pots and crickets buzzing at dusk: these are the sights and sounds of an English summer.
(4) We are all getting older thanks to better living conditions, and the French are way older than they have any right to be considering their diet, but the dependable Swedes who have always been goody-goodies are still croaking in their 80s, so most of us will have to settle for that.
(5) And so they hardly ever leave a flat in which, thanks to the croaking boiler, the temperature hovers around 10 degrees.
(6) With drugs, oblivious, in a basement, frozen nobly on a mountain top, screaming in a car crash, or traditionally in a bed surrounded by our family and children, croaking out our last wishes?
(7) "Intelligent tadpoles reconcile themselves to the inconvenience of their position by reflecting that although most of them will live to be tadpoles and nothing more, the most fortunate of the species will one day shed their tails, distend their mouths and stomachs, hop nimbly on to dry land and croak addresses to their former friends on the virtue by which tadpoles of character and capacity can rise to be frogs."
(8) Three decades later, in July 2011, to watch a slightly pasty, croaking, self-styled "humble" Murdoch appear before a televised committee of suddenly irreverent MPs was to see something dragged out into the light: a power relationship that would never be quite the same again.
(9) Talked a lot about Under Milk Wood: how he came to London in 1953, with a fiver in his pocket, and went in search of Dylan Thomas in the Soho and Fitzrovia pubs, only to find that he had just croaked in New York.
(10) But as the fearless Ali strutted on, inventing new ways, new scenes, new angles, new endings, those croaking pronouncements of veterans petered out.
(11) The only MacTaggarts regularly recalled with relish are those in which all-powerful television grandees were venomously slagged off in public - Dennis Potter's attack on the then BBC director general John Birt as a "croak-voiced Dalek" in 1993, and Michael Grade's escalation of his own feud with Birt the previous year.
(12) I learn to distinguish the croaks of the marsh frog from the scratchy cry of the reed warbler and watch brightly coloured damselflies darting about in the bullrushes.
(13) This report investigates the sources of stimuli which initiate and inhibit the release croak of Rana pipiens.
(14) It can be a surprisingly noisy place, what with the barking of the muntjac deer, the croaking of the frogs, the quacking of the widgeons … Look and listen out for Faint lights near the ground, especially in June and July.
(15) Cool off after a hot day on the beach in the natural swimming pond, complete with lily pads and croaking frogs.
(16) At the moment the city also sounds like seagulls croaking at each other from outside my window from about 3am every morning.
(17) Roger no longer expresses a desire to croak it prematurely although he is 69 years old now and back on the road.
(18) Even if it was in a husky croak, and I couldn't manage the chorus.
(19) There was no trace of human life, only the croak of a raven and a trickling stream.
(20) The pectoral fin of the croaking gourami, Trichopsis vittatus, has become modified as a sound-producing organ and retains its original function in locomotion and hovering.