Scramble

How to spell scramble

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce scramble

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does scramble mean?

1. verbTo move or climb hurriedly and awkwardly, often using the hands, or to compete in a disorganised rush for something.
2. verbTo cook beaten eggs while stirring them so they set in soft, broken curds.
3. verbTo mix things into a confused jumble, or to alter a signal or message so it cannot be understood without decoding.
4. nounA hurried, disorganised effort, struggle, or climb to reach or obtain something.

Scramble in a sentence

• verb

  The hikers had to scramble over loose rocks to reach the ridge.

• verb

  She likes to scramble the eggs with a little butter and cream.

• verb

  The device will scramble the phone call so that nobody can eavesdrop.

• noun

  The morning scramble to get the children dressed and fed left her exhausted.

• verb

  Shoppers began to scramble for the few discounted televisions left in stock.

• verb

  On Sundays he will scramble half a dozen eggs for the whole family.

Where does scramble come from?

Language of origin: Other

Scramble first appears in English in the late 1500s, and its origins are genuinely murky, which is why dictionaries usually label it imitative or echoic. It seems to belong to a small family of words built on a 'scr-' cluster that suggests scratching, clawing, and clumsy effort, including 'scrabble' (to scratch about with the hands) and the dialect word 'scramp'. The '-le' ending is a frequentative suffix, the same one that turns 'crack' into 'crackle' and 'wrest' into 'wrestle', signalling a busy, repeated action, here the frantic clambering or grabbing the word describes. From the literal sense of climbing hurriedly using hands and feet, it broadened to mean any disorderly rush or struggle to get something, then to mixing things up in a jumbled way, as in eggs beaten and cooked together or a radio signal deliberately muddled. Because the origin is uncertain rather than borrowed from a known Latin or French root, the spelling has no helpful foreign pedigree to lean on, though the silent-feeling 'b' between 'm' and 'l' is the one place writers occasionally stumble.

How the word is built

• scramb- (imitative base, related to 'scrabble' meaning to scratch or claw)
• -le (frequentative verb suffix indicating repeated action)