Crab

How to spell crab

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce crab

What does crab mean?

1. nounA ten-legged crustacean with a broad hard shell and a pair of pincers, often eaten as seafood.
2. nounA small, sour wild apple, or the tree that bears it.

Crab in a sentence

• The fishmonger sold a fresh crab caught that morning.

• The old crab tree in the garden produced bitter little fruit.

• A small crab scuttled sideways across the wet sand.

• She boiled the crab apples down into a tart jelly.

Where does crab come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word crab comes from the Old English crabba, the name for the familiar shore-dwelling crustacean with a hard shell and pincers. It belongs to a wider Germanic family that includes the Dutch krab and German Krabbe, and it is thought to trace back to a Germanic root meaning 'to scratch' or 'to claw', a fitting image for the animal's sideways scuttle and grasping pincers. The same root family also gave English the verb 'to crawl', which captures that low, scrabbling motion. The 'crab apple' sense, a small sour fruit, is recorded from the 1300s and may be unrelated in origin, possibly borrowed from a Scandinavian word; the two senses simply converged in spelling. The word is spelled exactly as it sounds, with the doubled 'b' appearing only in inflected forms such as crabby, which is why the bare word itself is straightforward.

How the word is built

• crab (single Old English root; no prefix or suffix)