Audio (Southern England): | (file) |
From Middle English scratten. Origin uncertain; apparently related to Swedish kratta (“to rake”). Also compare German kratzen (“to scratch”).
scrat (third-person singular simple present scrats, present participle scratting, simple past and past participle scratted)
Compare Old English scritta (“a hermaphrodite”), which had an earlier sense of "effeminate person, castrated man," presumably related to sċieran (“to cut”). Liberman notes that Germanic glossators, not familiar with Ovid, did not know exactly how to translate Latin hermaphroditus and instead matched it with more native words related to sexual deficiencies.[1]
scrat (plural scrats)
From Middle English scrat, from Old English *scrætt, from Proto-Germanic *skrattuz (“troll, forest monster”). Compare German Schratt and Old Norse skratti.
scrat (plural scrats)
Part or all of this entry has been imported from the 1913 edition of Webster’s Dictionary, which is now free of copyright and hence in the public domain. The imported definitions may be significantly out of date, and any more recent senses may be completely missing.
(See the entry for “scrat”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.)