cripple

Etymology

From Middle English cripel, crepel, crüpel, from Old English crypel (“crippled; a cripple”), from Proto-Germanic *krupilaz (“tending to crawl; a cripple”), from Proto-Indo-European *grewb- (“to bend, crouch, crawl”), from Proto-Indo-European *ger- (“to bend, twist”), equivalent to creep + -le. Cognate with Dutch kreupel, Low German Kröpel, German Krüppel, Old Norse kryppill.

adj

1. (now rare, dated) crippled
   Early treatment, and treatment spread over a long period, was the on means of rendering a cripple child fit to mix with its fellows on anything like equal terms, […] 1922, Maternity and Child Welfare - Volume 6
   You let sin in a church and it will cripple that church's ministry. Let sin get its ugly hands on the life of an individual and it will wreck and ruin and twist any life that it gets a hold on. Here was a cripple man who was excluded from the temple. 2006, Glenn Earle Cummings, The Touch of His Hand
   Other[s] think that, certain challenges are for certain people and not for them, that the reason when some women give birth to a cripple child, or male child instead to a female child, they think God did not answer their wishes, forgetting that every child is a gift from God […] 2014, Paul M Mahlobogwane, Transcend like a Butterfly
   He held the cripple boy like a towel. The cripple boy's arms and legs dangled uselessly over his father's arm, one of each on either side, while his father balanced the diaper-clad boy on his forearm. 2015, Brennan Morton, Dying For Strangers: Memoirs of a Special Ops Operator in Iraq

noun

1. (sometimes offensive) a person who has severely impaired physical abilities because of deformation, injury, or amputation of parts of the body.
   He returned from war a cripple.
2. A shortened wooden stud or brace used to construct the portion of a wall above a door or above and below a window.
3. (dialect, Southern US except Louisiana) scrapple.
4. (among lumbermen) A rocky shallow in a stream.

verb

1. To make someone a cripple; to cause someone to become physically impaired.
   The car bomb crippled five passers-by.
2. (figurative) To damage seriously; to destroy.
   My ambitions were crippled by a lack of money.
3. (figurative) To cause severe and disabling damage; to make unable to function normally.
   With all these people all around / I'm crippled with anxiety / But I'm told it's where I'm s'posed to be. 2019, Ed Sheeran, Justin Bieber, I Don't Care
   But the penny was beginning to drop: even a successful railway could be crippled by its capital costs. 2012, Andrew Martin, Underground Overground: A passenger's history of the Tube, Profile Books, page 64
4. To release a product (especially a computer program) with reduced functionality, in some cases, making the item essentially worthless.
   The word processor was released in a crippled demonstration version that did not allow you to save.
5. (slang, video games) To nerf something which is overpowered.