kneifen.
to pinch, to squeeze
Meaning & usage
to pinch, to squeeze
to chicken out; to back out; to shirk
vor etwas kneifen
Where this word comes from
Derived from earlier kneipen, from Middle Low German knīpen, from Old Saxon *knīpan, from Proto-West Germanic *knīpan. Cognate with Dutch knijpen. Doublet of kniepen (“to blink”), a more recent borrowing from modern Low German. The form with -f- is an adaptation to the High German consonantism, for which there may have been rare antetypes in northern dialects of Central German, but which was chiefly artificial. Kneipen remained predominant until the earlier 19th century, but was somewhat informal. The more standard-looking kneifen then fully established itself in written German and displaced kneipen by the mid-20th century.
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.