Definition of "crib"

In two minutes I was kneeling by the child’s crib, and Sandy was dispatching servants here, there, and everywhere, all over the palace. I took in the situation almost at a glance -- membranous croup!

1889, Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

a day or two afterwards I learned that Miss Temple, on returning to her own room at dawn, had found me laid in the little crib; my face against Helen Burns’s shoulder, my arms round her neck. I was asleep, and Helen was -- dead.

1847 October 16, Currer Bell [pseudonym; Charlotte Brontë], “”, in Jane Eyre. An Autobiography. […], volumes (please specify |volume=I to III), London: Smith, Elder, and Co., […]

I began to think of my horse. He, however, like an old campaigner, had taken good care of himself. I found him paying assiduous attention to the crib of Indian corn, and dexterously drawing forth and munching the ears that protruded between the bars.

1835, Washington Irving, chapter 35, in A Tour on the Prairies

A kitchen, a meat-house, a dairy, a crib with two stalls in the rear, one for the horse the other for the cow, were the out-buildings

1871, Richard Malcolm Johnston, Dukesborough Tales

Where no oxen are, the crib is clean: but much increase is by the strength of the ox.

1611, “Proverbs 14:4”, in The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […]

The singers were in a crib of wirework (like a large meat-safe or bird-cage) in one corner

1846, Charles Dickens, Pictures from Italy

He had seen so many lean years of faithful service when the enemy held the corner on all the official cribs that, now in the days of his party’s fatness and of his own righteous reward, the habit of good, honest hustling stuck to him, and he lined up an array of pulls and indorsements that made him swell with happiness every time he went over the list.

1904, Forrest Crissey, Tattlings of a Retired Politician

but if I have lost my crib and get nothing in exchange I shall feel what a soft Johnny I have been.

1893, Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventure of the Stockbroker’s Clerk‎

Why rather, sleep, liest thou in smoky cribs, / Upon uneasy pallets stretching thee, / And hushed with buzzing night-flies to thy slumber, / Than in the perfumed chambers of the great,

c. 1596–1599, William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 2, act 3, scene 1, lines 9–12

“May we play crib, Mrs. Radford?” he asked.

1913, D[avid] H[erbert] Lawrence, “Chapter 12”, in Sons and Lovers, London: Duckworth & Co. […]

The cards were brought and Fanny played at cribbage with her aunt till bed-time; and as Sir Thomas was reading to himself, no sounds were heard in the room for the next two hours beyond the reckonings of the game—And that makes thirty-one, four in hand and eight in crib.

1814 July, [Jane Austen], chapter XI, in Mansfield Park: […], volume II, London: […] T[homas] Egerton, […], page 239

He ate a thick square of banana cake from his crib and stared into the fire.

2002, Alex Miller, Journey to the Stone Country, Allen & Unwin, published 2003, page 40

Here's Pannum and Lap, and good Poplars of Yarrum, / To fill up the Crib, and to comfort the Quarron.

1641–42, Richard Brome, A Joviall Crew, or, The Merry Beggars‎, published 1652, act 2

[On Chapman's use of a Latin literal translation of Homer] As will appear, he blocked out his translation from the Latin crib, keeping one eye uneasily on the Greek, and, enlightened by Scapula or by his own poetic intuition, worked out his own rendering, often marking the departure from the Latin by a defiant note in the margin or commentary.

1966, Millar MacLure, George Chapman: a critical study‎, page 171

Why, you would not be boosing till lightman's in a square crib like mine, as if you were in a flash panny?

1828, Edward Bulwer Lytton Baron Lytton, Pelham, Or, Adventures of a Gentleman

Toby and me were over the garden-wall the night afore last, sounding the panels of the door and shutters. The crib's barred up at night like a jail; but there's one part we can crack, safe and softly.

1838, Charles Dickens, chapter XIX, in Oliver Twist

My flow, my show brought me the dough / That bought me all my fancy things / My crib, my cars, my pools, my jewels.

2003, “In da Club”, in 50 Cent, Dr. Dre, Mike Elizondo (lyrics), Get Rich or Die Tryin', performed by 50 Cent

I knew every inch ofthis joint. I had come of age up in here, and it was more of a home to me than the crib where I rested my head each night.

2006, Noire [pseudonym], Thug-A-Licious: An Urban Erotic Tale, New York, N.Y.: One World/Ballantine Books, page 109

if only the vital energy be not cribbed or cramped

1860, Isaac Taylor, “(please specify the page)”, in Ultimate Civilization and Other Essays, London: Bell and Daldy […]

But now I am cabin'd, cribbed, confined, bound in, / To saucy doubts and fears

a. 1606, William Shakespeare, Macbeth, act 3, scene 4, lines 23–24

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.

1857, Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown's School Days

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?

2017 August 9, Laura Bradley, “How Star Wars: The Last Jedi Will—and Won’t—Echo The Empire Strikes Back”, in Vanity Fair‎

There are a brace of birds and hare, that I cribbed this morning out of a basket of game.

1772, Samuel Foote, The Nabob‎, published 1778, act 1, page 22

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?

1848, Charles Dickens, “14”, in Dombey and Son

"Somebody crib the mayor's crown jools, or has some joyous cuss eloped with the auto patrol?"

1920 June, The Electrical Experimenter, New York, page 151, column 2

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.

1957, L.P.Hartley, chapter XI, in Hireling, page 90

[…] 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.

1661, John Gauden, Anti Baal-Berith‎, page 35