Crouch

How to spell crouch

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce crouch

What does crouch mean?

1. verbTo lower the body close to the ground by bending the knees and leaning forward.
2. nounA low, bent body position with the knees drawn up close to the ground.

Crouch in a sentence

• verb

  The photographer had to crouch behind the wall to get the shot.

• noun

  The runner waited in a tense crouch before the starting gun.

• verb

  Children love to crouch under the table during a game of hide and seek.

• noun

  She settled into a comfortable crouch to inspect the bottom shelf.

Where does crouch come from?

Language of origin: French

Crouch entered English in the late 1300s from Old French, where the verb crouchir or crochir meant 'to bend, to stoop', a sense rooted in the word croche meaning 'hook' or 'crook'. The underlying idea is bodily curving into a hooked shape, drawing the knees and shoulders inward toward a low position. That same croche root, naming a small hook, also gave us 'crochet' (the hooked needlework) and is a cousin of 'crook', so the family all shares the notion of something bent or hooked. The spelling settled with the ground that the central sound is the 'ow' diphthong spelled ou and the soft ending spelled ch, giving the compact one-syllable form we use today. The word has carried its plain physical meaning of lowering the body close to the ground steadily from medieval English into modern use.

How the word is built

• crouch (single root, from Old French croche 'hook, crook'); no prefix or suffix