Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • intransitive verb To crush or crunch with the teeth.
  • intransitive verb To strike heavily with a crunching sound.
  • intransitive verb To make a crunching sound, especially in walking over snow.
  • noun A crunching sound.
  • noun The sound of an exploding shell.
  • noun A heavy blow.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Crooked; bent.
  • To make a crunching noise, as in eating what is hard and brittle; emit a creaking sound, as snow when crushed under the feet; crunch.
  • To bend; crook.
  • To be out of temper.
  • To become perverted or corrupt.
  • Brittle; crusty; dry-baked; crisp.
  • noun A deformed or crooked person.
  • noun The cramp.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective obsolete Crooked; bent.
  • adjective Prov. Eng. & Scot. Hard or crusty; dry baked.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun The sound of a muffled explosion.
  • verb intransitive To produce such a sound.
  • adjective UK, Scotland, dialect Hard or crusty; dry baked
  • adjective obsolete crooked; bent

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • verb bombard with heavy shells
  • verb explode heavily or with a loud dull noise
  • verb make a noise typical of an engine lacking lubricants

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Imitative.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

(onomatopoeia)

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Anglo-Saxon crumb stooping, bent down, akin to Old High German chrumb, German krumm, Danish krum, and English cramp.

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Examples

Comments

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  • In winter trenches, cowed and glum,

    With crumps and lice and lack of rum,

    He put a bullet through his brain.

    No one spoke of him again.

    - Siegfried Sassoon, 'Suicide in the Trenches'.

    July 23, 2009

  • Boris Johnson, Scott Morrison, Donald Trump:

    A bozo, a flim-flam, a grump.

    After years of their guff

    We'd all had enough

    And they were dispatched with a satisfying crump!

    July 8, 2022