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crook

Pronunciation: /kɹʊk/

The English word “crook” has 17 meanings listed here.

noun

  1. A bend; turn; curve; curvature; a flexure.
  2. A bending of the knee; a genuflection.
  3. A bent or curved part; a curving piece or portion (of anything).
  4. A person who steals, lies, cheats, or does other dishonest or illegal things; a criminal; a scoundrel, scofflaw, lawbreaker, rogue, or miscreant.
  5. A lock or curl of hair.
  6. A support beam consisting of a post with a cross-beam resting upon it; a bracket or truss consisting of a vertical piece, a horizontal piece, and a strut.
  7. A specialized staff with a semi-circular bend (a "hook") at one end used by shepherds to control their herds.
  8. A bishop's standard staff of office.
  9. An artifice; a trick; a contrivance.
  10. A pothook.
  11. A small tube, usually curved, applied to a trumpet, horn, etc., to change its pitch or key.

verb

  1. To bend, or form into a hook.
  2. To become bent or hooked.
  3. To turn from the path of rectitude; to pervert; to misapply; to twist.

adjective

  1. Bad, unsatisfactory, not up to standard.
  2. Ill, sick.
  3. Annoyed, angry; upset.

Etymology

From Middle English croke, crok, from Old English *crōc (“hook, bend, crook”), from Proto-West Germanic *krōk, from Proto-Germanic *krōkaz (“bend, hook”), from Proto-Indo-European *greg- (“tracery, basket, bend”). Cognate with Dutch kreuk (“a bend, fold, wrinkle”), Middle Low German kroke, krake (“fold, wrinkle”), Danish krog (“crook, hook”), Swedish krok (“crook, hook”), Icelandic krókur…

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Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.