Early cringe culture was about empathy and secondhand embarrassment. Today, being “cringe” is a serious infraction. After spending years in that environment, our sense of cringe has been heightened to ...

In the race for eyeballs, some brands have found that there’s a surefire way to make their content impossible to look away from—infusing it with "cringe." A healthy dose of unsettling weirdness can ...

When Gen Z isn’t busy trolling Millennials for their choice of jeans or carbon footprints, they’re hard at work bending and twisting the meaning of words you thought you once knew well. (Think sheesh ...

In a recent piece on his YouTube channel, professor of philosophy Hans-Georg Moeller argues that we have seen a recent rise in the use of the word “cringe” to describe a new, online form of ...

Cringe is having a moment. Millions of posts with the hashtag are shared online, and entire forums on Reddit are dedicated to discussing what makes us cringe. We’re all just too familiar with this ...

“I hated that movie. The love scene was so cringe.” Suddenly, this use of “cringe” seems to be everywhere. And some quasi-scientific evidence shows it’s on the rise. According to Google’s Ngram Viewer ...