buttock-clenching

English

Adjective

buttock-clenching (comparative more buttock-clenching, superlative most buttock-clenching)

  1. (informal) Suspenseful, frightening; causing anxiety.
    Synonyms: (North America) butt-clenching; see also Thesaurus:frightening
    • 2012, Michela Wrong, I Didn’t Do It For You, page 19:
      At the end of a buttock-clenching trip, we landed to find Eritrean helicopters crouched on the tarmac of an airport that had just been bombed by Ethiopian jets.
    • 2019, John Aston, Driven:
      I would zoom through the uphill left-hander at Coppice at a buttock-clenching 90mph (145km/h) in fourth, but on the climb up to Charlies the revs would fall away and third was needed just to maintain speed up the hill.