Craze

How to spell craze

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce craze

What does craze mean?

1. nounA short-lived but intense fashion or enthusiasm shared by many people.

Craze in a sentence

• The fitness craze had every office colleague counting their steps.

• Last summer's bubble tea craze saw new shops open on every corner.

Where does craze come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

The word craze goes back to the Middle English verb crasen, meaning 'to crack, break, or shatter', which is generally traced to a Scandinavian source, comparable to dialect words in Old Norse and the modern Swedish krasa, 'to crush or shatter'. Its earliest English uses were strikingly physical: you could craze a pot or a sheet of metal, meaning you cracked it into a network of fine flaws. From the idea of something cracked came a vivid figurative leap, so that a 'crazed' mind was a broken or unsound one, which is exactly why we still say a person is 'cracked' or 'crazy' today. By the early 1800s the noun had softened into the cheerful sense most people now mean: a passing fashion or enthusiasm that 'breaks out' and sweeps through a crowd. The straightforward spelling, ending in a simple -ze, rarely trips writers, but the link to crack and crazy is a useful memory anchor.

How the word is built

• craze (from Middle English crasen: to crack or shatter)