Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A losing first throw in the game of craps.
  • intransitive verb To make a losing throw in the game of craps. Usually used with out.
  • noun Excrement.
  • noun An act of defecating.
  • noun Foolish, deceitful, or boastful language.
  • noun Cheap or shoddy material.
  • noun Miscellaneous or disorganized items; clutter.
  • noun Insolent talk or behavior.
  • intransitive verb To defecate.
  • interjection Used to express anger or displeasure.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The highest part or top of anything.
  • noun The crop or craw of a fowl: used ludicrously for a man's stomach.
  • noun A crop of grain.
  • To raise a crop.
  • noun Darnel.
  • noun Buckwheat.
  • noun A throw with dice; especially, a losing cast in the game of craps, when the total of pips on the two dice is 2, 3, or 12. See craps.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • verb vulgar to defecate. Same as take a crap.
  • noun In the game of craps, a first throw of the dice in which the total is two, three, or twelve, in which case the caster loses. Also called craps.
  • noun vulgar same as excrement and feces.
  • noun vulgar nonsense; balderdash; bullshit; -- also used as an expletive.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun gambling A losing throw of 2, 3 or 12 in craps
  • noun obsolete The husk of grain; chaff.
  • noun slang Something of poor quality.
  • noun slang, vulgar Something that is rubbish; nonsense.
  • noun slang, vulgar Faeces or feces; a euphemism for shit.
  • noun slang, vulgar, countable An act of defecation.
  • noun slang Useless object, sometimes used as a plural
  • verb slang To defecate.
  • adjective Of poor quality.
  • interjection slang Expression of worry, fear, shock, surprise, disgust, annoyance or dismay.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun obscene terms for feces
  • noun obscene words for unacceptable behavior
  • verb have a bowel movement

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Back-formation from craps.]

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English crappe, chaff, from Old French crappe, from Medieval Latin crappa, perhaps of Germanic origin.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From "crab's eyes"

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Middle English; related to Dutch krappe, from krappen, Old French crappe. Ultimately of Proto-Germanic origin.

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Examples

Comments

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  • Interestingly (maybe only to me), the coarse slang meaning of this word only came about (according to the OED) in the last years of the nineteenth century. For about six hundred years before that, it didn't mean poop at all.

    "Identical with earlier Du. krappe ‘carptus, carptura, res decerpta, frustum decerptum siue abscissum, pars abrasa siue abscissa; pars carnis abscissa; crustum; offella, offula; placenta; pulpamentum’ (Kilian, 1599), connected with krappen to pluck off, cut off, separate. Cf. also F. crape, OF. crappe siftings, also ‘the grain trodden under feet in the barn, and mingled with the straw and dust’ (M. L. Delisle in Godef.), med.L. crappa in Du Cange. (Cf. also crapinum the smaller chaff.) In mod.F. the word has taken the sense of ‘dirt, filth’, and ‘grease of a millstone’. It is doubtful whether all the senses here placed belong to one word, though a common notion of ‘rejected or left matter, residue, dregs, dust’ runs through them."

    October 15, 2008

  • I've always assumed its modern meaning is derived from the famous WC designer and manufacturer Thomas Crapper.

    October 15, 2008

  • Well... I think that's an apocryphal connection, though there was a Thomas Crapper. You may be right. I'm not the one who's going to research it though.

    October 15, 2008

  • Asian pronunciation of an STD?

    August 25, 2009

  • Century Dictionary's 6th entry correctly defines crap as buckwheat.

    Buck wheat, called in some counties crap --definition from Grose's (1787) A Provincial Glossary. Recorded in Essex, Suffolk, and Norfolk.

    May 4, 2011

  • Century Dictionary's 5th entry defines crap as the highest part or top of any thing. Dr. Jamieson's Scottish Dictionary and Supplement, 1841, offers these phrases: "The crap of the earth", the surface of the ground; "the crap of a fishing-wand", the top or uppermost section of a fishing-rod. In the Scots Buchan dialect the cones of fir trees are called fir-craps.

    June 1, 2011

  • "The grain put at once on a kiln to be dried." --Dr. Jamieson's Scottish Dictionary and Supplement, 1841.

    June 1, 2011

  • "To fill; to stuff. Hence, crappit heads, the heads of haddocks stuffed with a pudding made of the roe, oatmeal, and spiceries; formerly an accompaniment to fish and sauce in Scotland." --Dr. Jamieson's Scottish Dictionary and Supplement, 1841.

    June 1, 2011