Crumble

How to spell crumble

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce crumble

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does crumble mean?

1. verbTo break or fall apart into small fragments.
2. nounA baked pudding of fruit covered with a loose, crumbly topping of flour, butter, and sugar.

Crumble in a sentence

• verb

  The old mortar between the bricks began to crumble in the rain.

• noun

  She served warm apple crumble with a jug of custard.

• verb

  Stale biscuits tend to crumble the moment you pick them up.

• noun

  The recipe for rhubarb crumble calls for plenty of brown sugar.

Where does crumble come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word grew out of the older English word 'crumb', which comes from the Old English 'cruma', meaning a small fragment broken off a loaf of bread. To this base was added the suffix '-le', a frequentative ending that signals an action done repeatedly or continuously, so 'crumble' literally pictures something breaking into crumb after crumb. The form appears in late Middle English, around the 1400s, and is closely related to similar words in Dutch ('kruimelen') and German ('krümeln'), which share the same Germanic root for a tiny piece. Curiously, the silent 'b' that haunts the spelling of 'crumb' was not original; it was added by scribes who wanted the word to look like Latin-influenced relatives, and that intrusive 'b' survives audibly in 'crumble'. In British cooking the noun later came to name a baked pudding with a loose, crumbly topping. The path from a single broken fragment to a whole dessert is a neat illustration of how everyday words drift in meaning.

How the word is built

• crumb (a small fragment, from Old English cruma)
• -le (frequentative verb suffix indicating repeated action)