Ouching

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. Crying out with the sudden exclamation people make when they feel a sharp pain or a brief shock
2. Expressing a momentary jolt of hurt or surprise by voicing a short cry of discomfort
3. Making a brief vocal exclamation of pain, typically after being struck, pricked or startled

Etymology: The interjection "ouch" is the root here, and "ouching" is simply its present participle, meaning someone is making the cry. The most striking thing about the verb is that it was used as a verb at all: a 1654 English text describes "Sancho Pancas Runs Ouching round the mountaine like a ranck-Asse," a line that shows a 17th-century writer turning the cry of pain into an action, as if a person could go about ouching the way they might bleat or groan. The interjection itself is harder to pin down. One account links it to German "autsch" and, more specifically, to the Pennsylvania German "outch" ("cry of pain"), since the earliest recorded uses of the interjection come from Pennsylvania, dating from around 1838 in American English. Others treat it as a natural exclamation of pain that has existed since the mid-1600s, and the sources disagree on which view is correct.