Cracker

How to spell cracker

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce cracker

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cracker mean?

1. nounA thin, crisp, usually savoury baked biscuit, often eaten with cheese.
2. nounA festive paper tube that makes a bang when pulled apart, revealing a paper hat, a joke, and a small toy.
3. nounInformally, a person or thing that is outstandingly good or impressive.

Cracker in a sentence

• She spread soft cheese onto a cracker at the party.

• Each guest pulled a cracker before the Christmas dinner began.

• The final match of the season turned out to be a real cracker.

• The soup came with a small packet of one salted cracker.

• A paper hat and a tiny plastic toy fell out of the cracker.

• That last goal was an absolute cracker.

Where does cracker come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Cracker comes straight from the native English verb 'crack', which descends from the Old English 'cracian', meaning 'to make a sharp, sudden noise' or 'to resound'. That verb has solid Germanic roots, with relatives in Dutch 'kraken' and German 'krachen', all imitating the sound of something snapping. The agent suffix '-er' was simply added to mean 'a thing that cracks', and from the 1400s onwards the word was applied to anything that snapped, split, or made a loud report. The thin baked biscuit took the name in the late 1700s because it crackled and broke crisply when bitten, while the festive paper tube earned it in Victorian Britain for the bang it makes when pulled apart. Because the spelling is built so transparently from 'crack' plus '-er', the only real trap is remembering the doubled 'c' and 'k' sound spelled as the single letters 'c' and 'ck'.

How the word is built

• crack (to break with a sharp snap)
• -er (agent or thing-that-does suffix)