• IPA: /blɛnt͡ʃ/

blench (blenches, present participle blenching; past and past participle blenched)

1. (intransitive) To shrink; start back; give way; flinch; turn aside or fly off.

   • Blench not at thy chosen lot.

   • This painful, heroic task he undertook, and never blenched from its fulfillment.

   • 1998, Andrew Hurley (translator), Jorge Louis Borges, "Ibn-Hakam al-Bokhari, Murdered in His Labyrnth", Collected Fictions, Penguin Putnam, p.255

     "This," said Dunraven with a vast gesture that did not blench at the cloudy stars, and that took in the black moors, the sea, and a majestic, tumbledown edifice that looked like a stable fallen upon hard times, "is my ancestral land."

2. (intransitive, of the eye) To quail.
3. (transitive) To deceive; cheat.
4. (transitive) To draw back from; shrink; avoid; elude; deny, as from fear.
   • 2012, Jan 13, Polly Toynbee, "Welfare cuts: Cameron's problem is that people are nicer than he thinks", The Guardian

     Yesterday the government proclaimed no turning back, but the lords representing the likes of the disability charity Scope or Macmillan Cancer Support should make them blench.

5. (transitive) To hinder; obstruct; disconcert; foil.
6. (intransitive) To fly off; to turn aside.
   • c. 1603–1604, William Shakespeare, “Measvre for Measure”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies: Published According to the True Originall Copies (First Folio), London: Printed by Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, OCLC 606515358 ↗, [Act IV, scene v]:

     Though sometimes you do blench from this to that.

blench (plural blenches)

1. A deceit; a trick.
   • c. 1210, MS. Cotton Caligula A IX f.246.

     Feir weder turnedh ofte into reine; / An wunderliche hit makedh his blench.

2. A sidelong glance.
   • 1609, William Shakespeare, “Sonnet 110”, in Shake-speares Sonnets. Neuer before Imprinted, London: By G[eorge] Eld for T[homas] T[horpe] and are to be sold by William Aspley, OCLC 216596634 ↗:

     These blenches gave my heart another youth.

blench (blenches, present participle blenching; past and past participle blenched)

1. (obsolete) To blanch.
   • 1934, Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, Harper Perennial (2005), p.283

     The seasons are come to a stagnant stop, the trees blench and wither, the wagons role in the mica ruts with slithering harplike thuds.

• blench holding
• unblenching