crump

• IPA^(key): /kɹʌmp/
• Homophones: Crump, krump
• Rhymes: -ʌmp

Onomatopoeic.

crump (plural crumps)

1. The sound of a muffled explosion.
   • 1929, Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That

     [hymn] "To an inheritance incorruptible . . . Through faith unto salvation, Ready to be revealed at the last trump." For "trump" we always used to sing "crump." A crump was German five-point-nine shell, and "the last crump" would be the end of the War.

   • 1999, Kate Atkinson, Behind the Scenes at the Museum

     Crump, crack! A shell exploded near them and the whole aircraft yawned to port as if somebody had punched it through the sky.

   • 2000, Richard Woodman, The Darkening Sea

     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.

   • 2008, Paul Wood, BBC News. Taking cover on Sderot front line

     "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.

crump (third-person singular simple present crumps, present participle crumping, simple past and past participle crumped)

1. (intransitive) To produce such a sound.
   • 2007 September 28, William Grimes, “In Middle Leg of the Race, the Prize Was Italy”, in New York Times‎:

     “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.”

This etymology is incomplete. You can help Wiktionary by elaborating on the origins of this term.

crump (third-person singular simple present crumps, present participle crumping, simple past and past participle crumped)

1. (intransitive, US, medical slang) For one's health to decline rapidly (but not as rapidly as crash).
   • 1998, Marsha E. Fonteyn, Thinking Strategies for Nursing Practice, Lippincott, page 167:

     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.[”]

   • 2009, Kevin Schwechten, USMLE Step 3 Triage: An Effective, No-nonsense Review, Oxford University Press, page 4:

     if the patient is acutely crumping from cardiac arrest, do not waste time doing an ECG when you could be performing CPR.

   • [2017 December 30, Natalie Rahhal, “The secret codes doctors use to INSULT their patients right in front of them - and why the lingo harms your health care”, in Daily Mail Online‎:

     Not to be confused with the dance style, doctors use 'crumping' when they have a patient that is 'crashing, but not aggressively,' the Chicago doctor told Daily Mail Online.]

• circle the drain

See crumb.

crump (comparative more crump, superlative most crump)

1. (Britain, Scotland, dialectal) Hard or crusty; dry baked

   a crump loaf

From Middle English crump, cromp, croume, from Old English crump, crumb (“stooping, bent, crooked”), from Proto-Germanic *krumbaz, *krumpaz (“bent”). Compare Dutch krom (“bent”), German krumm (“crooked”), Danish krum. Related to cramp.

crump (comparative more crump, superlative most crump)

1. (obsolete) Crooked; bent.
   • Jeremy Taylor

     Crooked backs and crump shoulders.