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by Kate Woodford

In this week’s post, I’m looking at words for fairly minor injuries – the sort of injuries that most of us get now and then as we go about our lives (even though we may try hard not to).

Let’s start with that most common of injuries, the bruise. A bruise is an area of the skin that is darker than usual as a result of falling or being hit with something. The adjective is bruised and if you have a lot of bruises on your body – or a part of it – you might use the idiom black and blue:

Her right leg is covered in bruises. / She has a very bruised shoulder.

My shoulder and arm were black and blue where I hit the pavement.

Staying with this injury, if someone has bruises around the eye area because they have been hit there, you can call it a black eye. (An informal word for this is a shiner.)

He’d got into a fight at the weekend and had a black eye.

You’re going to have a real shiner in the morning!

The word gash is used for a long, deep cut in the skin. It is a noun and a verb:

He had a nasty gash in his arm that needed stitches. / She’d gashed her leg on a sharp piece of rock.

Meanwhile, the noun scratch refers to a very shallow cut made to the skin with something sharp. Scratch is also a verb:

I had various scratches on my arm from the cat. / I scratched myself on the roses.

(To express surprise that someone was not injured at all in a bad accident, you can say that they emerged/escaped/walked away, etc. without a scratch: Amazingly, he escaped without a scratch.)

If you graze or scrape part of the body (typically the knee), you break the surface of the skin by rubbing against something rough. Worse, if you skin an area of the body, you rub off an area of skin in an accident. Graze and scrape are also nouns:

He’d fallen over and grazed his knee./ Her legs were covered with scrapes and bruises.

Unfortunately, she slipped on the rocks and skinned her arm.

When cuts, scratches and grazes start to heal, the hard, brown layer that forms over them is called a scab and an area of the body with lots of scabs is scabby:

She has a big scab on her knee. / Look at your scabby knees!

If you bump part of your body (typically your head), you hit it against something hard. An injury (often raised and bruised) caused in this way is a bump:

I bumped my head as I was getting out of the car.

He’s got a really nasty bump on his forehead.

Finally, a part of the body that is larger than normal as a result of an injury may be described as swollen:

My ankle is really red and swollen.

That’s it for minor injuries. I hope very much you get through the week ahead without so much as a scrape or a scratch!