Crease

How to spell crease

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce crease

What does crease mean?

1. nounA line or ridge made in cloth, paper, or skin by folding, pressing, or wrinkling.
2. verbTo make a line or ridge in something by folding, pressing, or wrinkling it.
3. nounA white line marked on a cricket pitch that defines the batter's or bowler's position.

Crease in a sentence

• noun

  A sharp crease ran down the front of his ironed trousers.

• verb

  Packing the shirt too tightly will crease the collar.

• noun

  The batter stayed safely behind the crease to avoid being run out.

• noun

  She smoothed the document to remove every crease before scanning it.

• verb

  Try not to crease the photographs while sorting them.

• noun

  The umpire checked whether the bowler had overstepped the crease.

Where does crease come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Crease first appears in English writing in the 1500s, and its earliest spelling was often 'creast' or 'creaste', which strongly suggests it began as a variant of the word 'crest'. That older word traces back to the Latin crista, meaning a tuft, plume, or ridge, the same root that gives us the crest of a bird or a hill. A folded ridge in cloth or paper would naturally have been thought of as a small raised 'crest' running across the surface, and over time the spelling settled into 'crease' while losing the sense of height and keeping only the idea of a sharp line. The exact path of the change is not fully documented, which is why dictionaries treat the origin as probable rather than certain. The cricketing 'crease', a line marked on the pitch, simply borrows the same image of a scored line. The spelling trap is the '-ease' ending, which sounds like a plain 's' yet is written with the softer letters of words such as 'lease' and 'please'.

How the word is built

• crease (single root, probably an altered form of 'creast', an old variant of 'crest')