Crabs

How to spell crabs

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce crabs

What does crabs mean?

1. nounMore than one crab, the hard-shelled marine creatures with claws.

Crabs in a sentence

• Fresh crabs were piled high on ice at the fish market.

• We caught three crabs in the net off the end of the pier.

Where does crabs come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the plural of crab, which comes from the Old English crabba, the name for the hard-shelled, sideways-walking sea creature. The word belongs to a wider Germanic family: related forms appear in Old Norse as krabbi and in German as Krabbe, and they all seem to trace back to a root meaning 'to scratch' or 'to claw', a fitting description of the animal's pinching habit. The same scratching idea is why an ill-tempered person is called 'crabby' and why a sharp, sour apple is a 'crab apple'. The spelling has stayed remarkably stable over the centuries, and the plural simply adds an -s, with the b doubling only when suffixes like -ing or -ed are attached, not here. Because the word is short and phonetic, the only thing to watch is keeping a single b before the plural ending.

How the word is built

• crab (the crustacean, from Old English crabba)
• -s (plural suffix)