The AI-powered English dictionary
plural crumps
The sound of a muffled explosion. quotations examples
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?
1929 November, Robert Graves, chapter XVIII, in Good-bye to All That: An Autobiography, London: Jonathan Cape […], page 251
Crump, crack! A shell exploded near them and the whole aircraft yawned to port as if somebody had punched it through the sky.
1999, Kate Atkinson, Behind the Scenes at the Museum
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.
2000, Richard Woodman, The Darkening Sea
"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.
2008, Paul Wood, BBC News., Taking cover on Sderot front line
third-person singular simple present crumps, present participle crumping, simple past and past participle crumped
(intransitive) To produce such a sound. quotations examples
“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.”
2007 September 28, William Grimes, “In Middle Leg of the Race, the Prize Was Italy”, in New York Times
(intransitive, US, medical slang) (of one's health) to decline rapidly (but not as rapidly as crash). quotations
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.[”]
1998, Marsha E. Fonteyn, Thinking Strategies for Nursing Practice, Lippincott, page 167
if the patient is acutely crumping from cardiac arrest, do not waste time doing an ECG when you could be performing CPR.
2009, Kevin Schwechten, USMLE Step 3 Triage: An Effective, No-nonsense Review, Oxford University Press, page 4
comparative more crump, superlative most crump
(UK, Scotland, dialect) Hard or crusty; dry baked examples
(obsolete) Crooked; bent. quotations
Crooked backs and crump shoulders.
1701, John Gauden (attributed), Several Letters between Two Ladies Wherein the Lawfulness and Unlawfulness of Artificial Beauty in Point of Conscience are Nicely Debated