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cracker

Pronunciation: /ˈkɹækə(ɹ)/

The English word “cracker” has 14 meanings listed here.

noun

  1. A noisy boaster; a swaggering fellow.
  2. A dry, thin, crispy baked bread (usually salty or savoury, but sometimes sweet, as in the case of graham crackers and animal crackers).
  3. A prawn cracker.
  4. The final section of certain whips, which is made of a short, thin piece of unravelled rope, or which is a short piece of twisted string tied to the end of the whip, which produces a distinctive cracking sound when the whip is cracked.
  5. A firecracker.
  6. A Christmas cracker.
  7. A northern pintail, a dabbling duck of species Anas acuta.
  8. A person or thing that breaks a thing (e.g., nutcracker).
  9. Refinery equipment used to pyrolyse organic feedstocks. If catalyst is used to aid pyrolysis it is informally called a cat-cracker
  10. A pair of fluted rolls for grinding caoutchouc.
  11. One who cracks (i.e. overcomes) computer software or security restrictions.
  12. A fine, great thing or person (crackerjack).
  13. An ambitious or hard-working person (i.e. someone who arises at the 'crack' of dawn).
  14. An impoverished white person from the southeastern United States, originally associated with Georgia and parts of Florida; (by extension) any white person (slang).

Etymology

From Middle English craker (“a boaster”), equivalent to crack (“to break, snap, utter, make a sound”) + -er. From crack (verb), the sound made when one is broken. The hard "bread" and "biscuit" sense is first attested in 1739. The computing senses of cracker, crack, and cracking were promoted in the 1980s as an alternative to hacker, by programmers concerned about negative public associations of…

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