(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.
Crunch
Definition:
(v. i.) To chew with force and noise; to craunch.
(v. i.) To grind or press with violence and noise.
(v. i.) To emit a grinding or craunching noise.
(v. t.) To crush with the teeth; to chew with a grinding noise; to craunch; as, to crunch a biscuit.
Example Sentences:
(1) Recent data collected by the Games Outcomes Project and shared on the website Gamasutra backs up the view that crunch compounds these problems rather than solving them.
(2) Sometimes it can seem as if the history of the City is the history of its crises and disasters, from the banking crisis of 1825 (which saw undercapitalised banks collapse – perhaps the closest historic parallel to the contemporary credit crunch), through the Spanish panic of 1835, the railway bust of 1837, the crash of Overend Gurney, the Kaffir boom, the Westralian boom, the Marconi scandal, and so on and on – a theme with endless variations.
(3) Mitchell said enabling more big energy users to be paid for cutting demand at crunch times and building more interconnectors to other countries had worked better elsewhere.
(4) The fashion in Hollywood leading men now is for the sort of sculpted torso that requires months, if not years, of dedicated abdominal crunching.
(5) The market is lightly regulated and any problems could ripple out into a wider credit crunch.
(6) Recruitment has not returned to pre-credit crunch levels, and there is fierce competition for new jobs.
(7) The ratings agency also believes that a much-feared energy crunch which could take the lights out as soon as this winter or next will be temporary, with capacity margins rising to reach almost 20% by 2020.
(8) "I set out to create chips that used low-energy technology and that has allowed me to develop devices that can do all their data crunching on site.
(9) Total UK ad spend hit a previous high of £13.1bn in 2007 before dipping to £11.3bn in 2009 following the credit crunch and ensuing recession.
(10) The City is most focused on the investigation begun in April 2009 into the bank before it was rescued by the taxpayer following the takeover of ABN Amro, which left it crippled with bad debts and strapped for cash after paying too much for the bank just as the credit crunch began.
(11) In the year of the credit crunch, 2007, the bank's crucial tier one ratio – a measure of its financial health – was 4.7%.
(12) The munching, and some data crunching, produced firm statistical findings ("The flavour cowy was correlated with age and sourness, but was not correlated to any other flavours or tastes").
(13) As other countries look to transition to low-carbon alternatives with one eye on crunch climate talks in Paris later this year, Australia is pushing ahead with an expansion in coal extraction that its conservative prime minister Tony Abbott insists is “good for humanity”.
(14) Elisabeth Afseth, bond market expert at Evolution Securities, reckons that the first pointer of a fresh credit crunch was returning could be seen on August 18 this year when the European Central Bank revealed that one bank had borrowed $500m for a week – as it could not find the money on the open market.
(15) With the eurozone unravelling and world markets in turmoil, threatening even the meagre recovery the UK economy had achieved since the onset of the credit crunch, he repeatedly evokes a mood of national emergency to explain why the coalition he forged with David Cameron is the right government for the times.
(16) The atmospherics between the Athens government and its antagonists, which is now just about every player of importance in the rest of Europe, have been awful for weeks and have got more poisonous as they have neared the crunch.
(17) I used to get 8% on my savings before the credit crunch and was making money every month.
(18) The dramatic reconciliation of the warring factions comes as the credit crunch and worsening newspaper advertising market has left INM facing a funding crisis.
(19) Paragon's chief executive, Nigel Terrington, said the £200m facility from Macquarie would now be used to grant new loans and then as the facility was used up, the mortgages would be packaged up and sold off in the securitisation market that dried up in the credit crunch.
(20) But the world's largest insurer has seen its shares plunge in recent weeks as it reels from the effects of the credit crunch.