Crumbs

How to spell crumbs

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce crumbs

What does crumbs mean?

1. nounSmall fragments or scraps, especially those that fall from bread, biscuits, or cake.
2. interjectionA mild exclamation of surprise or dismay, used chiefly in British English.

Crumbs in a sentence

• noun

  She wiped the toast crumbs off the kitchen counter.

• interjection

  Oh crumbs, the train leaves in five minutes and the car will not start.

• noun

  The children left a trail of biscuit crumbs across the carpet.

• interjection

  Crumbs, the bill came to far more than anyone expected.

Where does crumbs come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word comes from the Old English cruma, meaning a small fragment or scrap, especially a piece broken from bread; it has cousins across the Germanic family, including the Dutch kruim and German Krume. For most of its history the word was spelled and pronounced without any final consonant after the m, as in the medieval forms crume and crome. The silent b that troubles modern spellers was added by scribes only later, around the sixteenth century, by analogy with words like dumb, thumb, and limb, where a b genuinely once sounded. So the b in crumbs is essentially a learned spelling fashion rather than a sound anyone ever pronounced, which is exactly why it is so easy to leave out. The related verb 'to crumble' kept that same intrusive b, reinforcing the pattern.

How the word is built

• crumb (a small fragment, from Old English cruma)
• -s (plural)