retrench.
To cut down or reduce.
Meaning & usage
To cut down or reduce.
To cut down or reduce. To terminate the employment of a worker to reduce the size of a workforce; to make redundant.
To cut down or reduce. To live less expensively; to economize.
To confine; to limit; to restrict.
To furnish with a retrenchment (a defensive work within a fortification).
to retrench bastions
To abridge; to curtail.
To take up a new defensive position.
We must retrench and try to hold on long enough for products in development to reach the market or we will be out of business.
Where this word comes from
From Old French retranchier (“to get rid of, remove”) (modern French retrancher (“to cut out, take away; to cut off; to cut down”)), from re- (“again”) + tranchier, trenchier (“to cut”) (modern French trancher (“to slice”)); further etymology uncertain, but possibly either from Vulgar Latin *trinicāre (“cut in three parts”) (from the root trini from trēs (“three”), based on the model of duplicāre (“to double by dividing, split in two, tear”)), or from an alteration of Latin truncāre (“to maim by cutting off pieces; to truncate”), also possibly influenced by Gaulish *trincare (“to cut (the head)”). Compare English trench.
To dig or redig a trench where one already exists.
Where this word comes from
Etymology tree Proto-Italic *wre- Latin re-der. Old French re-bor. Middle English re- English re- English trench English retrench From re- + trench.
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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.