subs. (colloquial).—1.  A smash, a soft or flat mass; and (2) a mellay: spec. (Harrow), see quot. 1876. As verb. = (1) to crush or smash: also TO GO SQUASH = to collapse; and (2) to silence by word or deed. Hence SQUASHER, SQUASHINESS, and SQUASHY.

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  1726.  SWIFT, Gulliver’s Travels, ii. 1. One of the reapers approaching … made me apprehend that with the next step I should be SQUASHED to death under his foot. Ibid., ii. 7. My fall was stopped by a terrible SQUASH.

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  1824–9.  LANDOR, Imaginary Conversations, ‘Southey and Porson,’ ii. Give a trifle of strength and austerity to the SQUASHINESS of our friend’s poetry.

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  1854.  DICKENS, Hard Times, xi. Wet through and through; with her feet squelching and SQUASHING in her shoes whenever she moved.

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  1867.  W. L. COLLINS, The Public Schools [Harrow], 312. The gravel cut the leather case of the ball occasionally, as well as the hands and faces of those who scrambled over it in a ‘SQUASH’ … which Rugby men know as a ‘scrummage,’ and Etonians as a ‘rooge.’

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  1888.  BROUGHTON, Fragile, in Harper’s Magazine, lxxviii. Dec., 80. It seemed churlish to pass him by without a sign, especially as he took off his SQUASH of a hat to me.

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  1898.  HUME NISBET, A Sweet Sinner, vi. George Keath was a stalwart man … and the like of this music teacher he could have settled and SQUASHED in half a minute.

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  3.  (Harrow).—Racquets played with a soft india-rubber ball: the ball is also known as a SQUASH.

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