crib
Americannoun
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a child's bed with enclosed sides.
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a stall or pen for cattle.
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a rack or manger for fodder, as in a stable or barn.
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a bin for storing grain, salt, etc.
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Informal.
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a translation, list of correct answers, or other illicit aid used by students while reciting, taking exams, or the like; pony.
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a petty theft.
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a room, closet, etc., in a factory or the like, in which tools are kept and issued to workers.
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a shallow, separate section of a bathing area, reserved for small children.
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any confined space.
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Slang. a house, shop, etc., frequented by thieves or regarded by thieves as a likely place for burglarizing.
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Building Trades, Civil Engineering. any of various cellular frameworks of logs, squared timbers, or steel or concrete objects of similar form assembled in layers at right angles, often filled with earth and stones and used in the construction of foundations, dams, retaining walls, etc.
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a barrier projecting part of the way into a river and then upward, acting to reduce the flow of water and as a storage place for logs being floated downstream.
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a lining for a well or other shaft.
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Slang. one's home; pad.
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Cribbage. a set of cards made up by equal contributions from each player's hand, and belonging to the dealer.
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a cheap, ill-kept brothel.
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a wicker basket.
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British, Australian. lunch, especially a cold lunch carried from home to work and eaten by a laborer on the job; snack.
verb (used with object)
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Informal. to pilfer or steal, especially to plagiarize (another's writings or ideas).
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to confine in or as if in a crib.
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to provide with a crib or cribs.
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to line with timber or planking.
verb (used without object)
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Informal.
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to use a crib in examinations, homework, translating, etc.
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to steal; plagiarize.
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(of a horse) to practice cribbing.
noun
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a child's bed with slatted wooden sides; cot
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a cattle stall or pen
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a fodder rack or manger
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a bin or granary for storing grain, etc
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a small crude cottage or room
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informal a house or residence
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a weekend cottage: term is South Island usage only
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any small confined space
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informal a brothel
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a wicker basket
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a representation of the manger in which the infant Jesus was laid at birth
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informal a theft, esp of another's writing or thoughts
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Also called (esp US): pony. informal a translation of a foreign text or a list of answers used by students, often illicitly, as an aid in lessons, examinations, etc
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short for cribbage
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cribbage the discard pile
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Also called: cribwork. a framework of heavy timbers laid in layers at right angles to one another, used in the construction of foundations, mines, etc
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a storage area for floating logs contained by booms
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a packed lunch taken to work
verb
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(tr) to put or enclose in or as if in a crib; furnish with a crib
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informal (tr) to steal (another's writings or thoughts)
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informal (intr) to copy either from a crib or from someone else during a lesson or examination
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(tr) to line (a construction hole) with timber beams, logs, or planks
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informal (intr) to grumble
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Participles
Conjugated Forms
Present
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cribsimple
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cribssimple
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have cribbedperfect
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has cribbedperfect
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am cribbingprogressive
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are cribbingprogressive
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is cribbingprogressive
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have been cribbingperfect progressive
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has been cribbingperfect progressive
Past
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cribbedsimple
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had cribbedperfect
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was cribbingprogressive
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were cribbingprogressive
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had been cribbingperfect progressive
Future
Etymology
Origin of crib
before 1000; Middle English cribbe, Old English crib ( b ); cognate with Dutch krib, German Krippe; cf. crèche
Explanation
A crib is a bed with high sides that babies sleep in. To crib is to cheat, like copying off someone else during an exam. How babyish! A crib is a small, cozy bed that has high sides known as slats. The slats keep the baby from falling out. To crib is different — it means to cheat, especially by copying or stealing information. If you stole an answer key to a test, you cribbed it. If you friend told you the answers to some homework, you cribbed the answers. Cribbing is dishonest.
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
The crib was smaller than what our son is used to and nobody slept all that well, but it beat lugging one along.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 26, 2026
Once a baby arrives, even the best-laid plans can fly out of the crib quicker than an unwanted Tickle Me Elmo.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 19, 2026
On the day of Thea's death, she was visited in the morning by a social worker who said the baby was in her crib, and that the mother had complained of feeling tired.
From BBC ● Apr. 29, 2026
The crib looks exactly the same as it did in the ’90s.
From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 13, 2026
It was something to play with when pretending to be a mommy, something to feed and rock and lay down gently in a crib.
From "Watch Us Rise" by Renée Watson and Ellen Hagan
Both fine and applied arts make up the show, which includes objects ranging from paintings and prints to cribs, cabinets, light fixtures and hardware.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 5, 2026
The findings, published in the journal Nature, show that the structures known as queen cells, sometimes called "royal cribs," are much more than protective containers.
From Science Daily ● Jun. 23, 2026
But the production offered her accommodations, including an extra dressing room to put her twins’ cribs in and a personal driver, so that her nanny could take the babies home early.
From Los Angeles Times ● May 24, 2024
She found a website that cribs audio from police radio channels, she testified.
From Seattle Times ● Oct. 5, 2023
But the last time he remembered the white walls and the rows of cribs.
From "Ceremony:" by Leslie Marmon Silko
Popular around my firehouse is a line directly cribbed from its military origins: “Death smiles at everyone. Firefighters smile back.”
From Slate ● Jul. 10, 2026
He cribbed the expression from Indian guru Meher Baba, but it could easily have been about momos in bull markets.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 2, 2025
She was 17 when they wed, beginning a royal partnership that seemed cribbed from a fairytale and would span almost seven decades.
From Barron's ● Oct. 25, 2025
He started a short-lived humor magazine, Read ’Em and Grin, mainly using jokes cribbed from other sources and selling ads to local merchants.
From New York Times ● Jun. 17, 2024
It would perhaps be unfair to say that the Romans cribbed their calendar from “decadent” Egypt, but not unfair by much.
From "Circumference" by Nicholas Nicastro
I’ve done the same a hundred times, cribbing from emails to compose essays, from text messages to finish poems.
From Salon ● Feb. 9, 2025
Thomas Weber, an expert on German history, pointed out that in modern Germany one far-right party has been cribbing wholesale from parts of the Nazi party manifesto.
From Los Angeles Times ● May 23, 2024
Firefighters secured the truck with “a grip hoist, grade 100 chain, and 6-inch vehicle strap cribbing, straps to keep the massively heavy vehicle from rolling any further forward,” fire officials posted on Facebook.
From Washington Times ● Dec. 26, 2023
The discipline already had a “massive plagiarism problem” with students borrowing computer code from friends or cribbing it from the internet, said MacKellar.
From Seattle Times ● Aug. 9, 2023
And after that I saw him pull a paper out of his sleeve--you know the kind I mean, the ones they fasten to an elastic--and he was cribbing his answers from that.
From Dick Randall The Young Athlete by Clark, Ellery H.
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
