Word: crib Part of Speech: verb Etymology: From Middle English crib, cribbe, from Old English crib, cryb, cribb, crybb (“couch, bed; manger, stall”), from Proto-West Germanic *kribbjā, from Proto-Germanic *kribjǭ (“crib, wickerwork”), from Proto-Indo-European *grebʰ-, *gerbʰ- (“bunch, bundle, tuft, clump”), from *ger- (“to turn, twist”). Cognate with Saterland Frisian Kräbbe, Krääb, Krääf (“crib”), West Frisian krêbe (“crib”), Dutch krib (“crib, manger”), German Krippe (“rack, crib”), Danish krybbe (“crib”), Icelandic krubba (“crib”). Doublet of crèche. The sense of ‘stealing, taking notes, plagiarize’ seems to have developed out of the verb. The criminal sense may derive from the 'basket' sense, circa the mid 18th century, in that a poacher could conceal poachings in such a basket (see the 1772 Samuel Foote quotation). The cheating sense probably derives from the criminal sense. Pronunciation: /kɹɪb/ 1. To place or confine in a crib. Labels: transitive Example: They may go to their beds and give themselves no trouble about their work, and yet in the morning the maids will find the kitchen swept up, and water brought in, and the men will find the horses in the stable well cleaned and curried, and perhaps a supply corn cribbed for them from the neighbours barns. 2. To shut up or confine in a narrow habitation; to cage; to cramp. Example: if only the vital energy be not cribbed or cramped Example: But now I am cabin'd, cribbed, confined, bound in, / To saucy doubts and fears 3. To collect one or more passages and/or references for use in a speech, written document or as an aid for some task; to create a crib sheet. Labels: transitive Example: I cribbed the recipe from the Food Network site, but made a few changes of my own. 4. To plagiarize; to copy; to cheat. Labels: informal, transitive Example: He then proceeded to patch his tags together with the help of his Gradus, producing an incongruous and feeble result of eight elegiac lines, the minimum quantity for his form, and finishing up with two highly moral lines extra, making ten in all, which he cribbed entire from one of his books, beginning "O genus humanum," and which he himself must have used a dozen times before, whenever an unfortunate or wicked hero, of whatever nation or language under the sun, was the subject. Example: This subplot—as well as a few other threads that have been teased from the Star Wars saga’s next installment—prompts another question: just how much of this film’s plot will be cribbed from The Empire Strikes Back? 5. To install timber supports, as with cribbing. Labels: intransitive 6. To steal or embezzle. Labels: archaic, transitive Example: There are a brace of birds and hare, that I cribbed this morning out of a basket of game. Example: It was very easy, Briggs said, to make a galley-slave of a boy all the half-year, and then score him up idle; and to crib two dinners a-week out of his board, and then score him up greedy; but that wasn’t going to be submitted to, he believed, was it? 7. To complain, to grumble Labels: India Example: She calls on the neighbours, she's out half the time and doesn't answer the telephone, and when I start cribbing she just laughs. 8. To crowd together, or to be confined, as if in a crib or in narrow accommodations. Example: […] who ſought to make the glory of the Nation and Church of England, which was ever Regal and Epiſcopal ſince it was Chriſtian, truckle under a Scotch Canopy, and to make Biſhops to crib in a Presbyterian trundle-bed; as much as Kingly Majeſtie, to be confounded with Democracy. 9. To seize the manger or other solid object with the teeth and draw in wind. Labels: intransitive 10. To use a known piece of information corresponding to a section of encrypted text, to work out the remaining sections.