crabbing

SayKRAB-ing/ˈkɹæbɪŋ/

5 meanings of crabbing

Practice

1
noununcountable
The activity or skill of catching crabs, whether for sport or for food.
The kids learned crabbing from their grandfather, using string and chicken necks for bait.
Good crabbing depends on the tide, the season, and a bit of patience.
2
verb
Present participle of crab.
The old sailor was crabbing about the weather again.
She spent the whole meeting crabbing over minor details.
Note
One spelling carries every verb behind crab: fishing for crabs, complaining, drifting sideways like a crab, and, in US slang, ruining something. The final b doubles before -ing, as in grabbing. Ruining always takes an object, complaining can go either way (crabbing, crabbing about the weather), and fishing and drifting take none. The gerund of fishing shades into the crab-catching noun.
3
noununcountable
Petty, persistent quarreling between people.
The long road trip dissolved into endless crabbing over who would drive.
Their meetings produced more crabbing than actual decisions.
Similarbickering, squabbling, quarreling, wrangling
4
nounhistoricaluncountable
A process of scouring cloth by passing it between rolls in a machine.
After weaving, the lengths went through crabbing to clear them of oils.
Uneven crabbing could leave streaks that showed once the cloth was finished.
Similarscouring
Note
A mill word from wool manufacture, now historical, naming one stage in finishing cloth. It belongs in accounts of how textiles were once made. In a passage about weaving and mills, read it as a machine process, not as catching crabs or complaining. Cloth goes through crabbing, and the word is rarely used in the plural.

Less common meaning

5
nounobsoleteuncountable
The fighting of trained hawks with one another.
He kept the young tiercels apart to prevent crabbing on the cadge.
A sudden bout of crabbing left one bird with a torn wing.
Note
A falconer's term, now obsolete, for hawks turning on one another. It belongs to the old working vocabulary of keeping and training birds of prey, so a modern reader is likely to meet it only in older writing on the sport. Do not confuse it with the sense of bickering, which describes quarreling people rather than birds.

crabbing is a form of crab

crab, verb: To fish for crabs, typically using baited lines, traps, or nets. Full entry

Forms: crabcrabs he/she/itcrabbing -ing formcrabbed past tense, past participle
Spelling: crab → crabbing: double the b, add -ing

Practice

Can you tell the meanings of crabbing apart? Answer 3 quick questions from this page, or write your own sentence and AI will check it.