crevice
English
editEtymology
editFrom Middle English crevice, from Old French crevace, from crever (“to break, burst”), from Latin crepō (“to break, burst, crack”). Doublet of crevasse.
Pronunciation
edit- (UK) IPA(key): /ˈkɹɛvɪs/
Audio (Southern England): (file)
Noun
editcrevice (plural crevices)
- A narrow crack or fissure, as in a rock or wall.
- 1830 June, Alfred Tennyson, “Mariana”, in Poems. […], volume I, London: Edward Moxon, […], published 1842, →OCLC, stanza VI, page 13:
- [T]he mouse / Behind the mouldering wainscot shriek'd, / Or from the crevice peer'd about.
- 16 March, 1926, Virginia Woolf, letter to V. Sackville-West
- I can't tell you how urbane and sprightly the old poll parrot was; and […] not a pocket, not a crevice, of pomp, humbug, respectability in him: he was fresh as a daisy.
- 1973, Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow:
- A dark turd appears out the crevice, out of the absolute darkness between her white buttocks.
- (slang) The vagina.
- 2018, Michael J. Manley, Still Waters Run Deep, page 130:
- […] howling like a wolf as I penetrated her harder and harder as she asked for more and more and moved her legs to the left and to the right so I could go deeper and deeper into her crevice.
Derived terms
editTranslations
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Verb
editcrevice (third-person singular simple present crevices, present participle crevicing, simple past and past participle creviced)
- To crack; to flaw.
- 1624, Henry Wotton, The Elements of Architecture, […], London: […] Iohn Bill, →OCLC:
- they are more apt in swagging down, to pierce with their points, then in the jacent Postures and […] crevice the Wall
References
edit- “crevice”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.
- William Dwight Whitney, Benjamin E[li] Smith, editors (1911), “crevice”, in The Century Dictionary […], New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., →OCLC.
- “crevice”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.
Old French
editAlternative forms
editEtymology
editFrom either Frankish *krebitja (“crayfish”), diminutive of *krebit (“crab”), from Proto-Germanic *krabitaz (“crab, cancer”), from Proto-Indo-European *grebʰ-, *gerebʰ- (“to scratch, crawl”), or from Old High German krebiz (“edible crustacean, crab”) (German Krebs (“crab”)), from the same source. Cognate with Middle Low German krēvet (“crab”), Dutch kreeft (“crayfish, lobster”), Old English crabba (“crab”).
Noun
editcrevice oblique singular, f (oblique plural crevices, nominative singular crevice, nominative plural crevices)
Descendants
edit- English terms inherited from Middle English
- English terms derived from Middle English
- English terms derived from Old French
- English terms derived from Latin
- English doublets
- English 2-syllable words
- English terms with IPA pronunciation
- English terms with audio pronunciation
- English lemmas
- English nouns
- English countable nouns
- English terms with quotations
- English slang
- English verbs
- Old French terms borrowed from Frankish
- Old French terms derived from Frankish
- Old French terms derived from Proto-Germanic
- Old French terms derived from Proto-Indo-European
- Old French terms borrowed from Old High German
- Old French terms derived from Old High German
- Old French lemmas
- Old French nouns
- Old French feminine nouns