crump

• IPA^(key): /kɹʌmp/

• Audio (Southern England):

  (file)

• Homophones: Crump, krump
• Rhymes: -ʌmp

Onomatopoeic.

crump (plural crumps)

1. The sound of a muffled explosion.
   • 1929 November, Robert Graves, chapter XVIII, in Good-bye to All That: An Autobiography, London: Jonathan Cape , →OCLC, page 251:

     And there was another bit [of a hymn]: ‘To an inheritance incorruptible. … Through faith unto salvation, Ready to be revealèd at the last trump.’ For ‘trump’ we always used to sing ‘crump.’ ‘The last crump’ was the end of the war and would we ever hear it burst safely behind us?

   • 1999, Kate Atkinson, Behind the Scenes at the Museum:

     Crump, crack! A shell exploded near them and the whole aircraft yawned to port as if somebody had punched it through the sky.

   • 2000, Richard Woodman, The Darkening Sea:

     Above this grey skyline slowly lifting clouds of dirty smoke rose into the morning air as the salvoes of Japanese shells exploded with a delayed crump.

   • 2008, Paul Wood, BBC News., Taking cover on Sderot front line‎:

     "Now you can see what life is like for us here," said Yakov Shoshani, raising his voice to make himself heard over the sound of a loud crump.

crump (third-person singular simple present crumps, present participle crumping, simple past and past participle crumped)

1. (intransitive) To produce such a sound.
   • 2007 September 28, William Grimes, “In Middle Leg of the Race, the Prize Was Italy”, in New York Times‎:

     “Mortars crumped, and from the high ground to the east and south came the shriek of 88-millimeter shells, green fireballs that whizzed through the dunes at half a mile a second, trailing golden plumes of dust.”

This etymology is incomplete. You can help Wiktionary by elaborating on the origins of this term.

crump (third-person singular simple present crumps, present participle crumping, simple past and past participle crumped)

1. (intransitive, US, medical slang) (of one's health) to decline rapidly (but not as rapidly as crash).
   • 1998, Marsha E. Fonteyn, Thinking Strategies for Nursing Practice, Lippincott, page 167:

     I can only be in one place at a time, so sometimes I just have to say, “Listen, I’ve got this other patient that’s crumping down the hall.[”]

   • 2009, Kevin Schwechten, USMLE Step 3 Triage: An Effective, No-nonsense Review, Oxford University Press, page 4:

     if the patient is acutely crumping from cardiac arrest, do not waste time doing an ECG when you could be performing CPR.

   • :

     Not to be confused with the dance style, doctors use 'crumping' when they have a patient that is 'crashing, but not aggressively,' the Chicago doctor told Daily Mail Online.]

• circle the drain

See crumb.

crump (comparative more crump, superlative most crump)

1. (UK, Scotland, dialect) Hard or crusty; dry baked

   a crump loaf

From Middle English crump, cromp, croume, from Old English crump, crumb (“stooping, bent, crooked”), from Proto-West Germanic *krump, from Proto-Germanic *krumpaz, *krumbaz (“bent”).

Compare Dutch krom (“bent”), German krumm (“crooked”), Danish krum. Related to cramp.

crump (comparative more crump, superlative most crump)

2. (obsolete) Crooked; bent.
   • 1701, John Gauden (attributed), Several Letters between Two Ladies Wherein the Lawfulness and Unlawfulness of Artificial Beauty in Point of Conscience are Nicely Debated:

     Crooked backs and crump shoulders.

• crumb

From Proto-Germanic *krumpaz

crump

1. bent, stooped, crooked

• English: crump