crackers
- 1Plural of cracker.
At the holiday dinner, everyone pulled crackers and put on the paper crowns inside.
Software crackers had stripped out the copy protection within a day of the game's release.
Note
The plural covers every cracker there is: snacks, fireworks, the Christmas crackers pulled at the table, and the people who break software protection. In the United States it is also an offensive term for white people, especially poor Southern whites, so a word that is harmless on a cheese board is not harmless aimed at someone.
- 2Crazy or insane, said of people and of ideas or actions alike.
It sounds like a crackers idea, but turning the old mill into flats might just work.
Anyone who swims in the North Sea in January is properly crackers.
Similarcrazy, bonkers, bananas, batty, barmy
Note
Though it looks like a plural, it is a true adjective in informal British English, used before a noun (a crackers thing to say) or after a verb, and compared with more and most. Properly can strengthen it: Dominic Cummings called Liz Truss as close to properly crackers as anybody he had met in parliament.
- 3The testicles.
The dog jumped up and caught him square in the crackers.
Forty miles on that narrow saddle left his crackers aching for days.
Note
It belongs to jokes and rough talk among friends; a doctor, a news report or any formal setting calls for testicles. There is no singular in this meaning, any more than for the leather trousers.
- 4Leather pants of a kind that make a noise whenever the wearer moves.
His stiff leather crackers creaked with every step he took toward the wagon.
On cold mornings the herders pulled on their crackers before heading out to the kraal.
Similarleathers
Note
A South African name taken from the noise itself: E. E. Napier wrote in 1849 of sheepskin trousers called crackers from the sound they make at every movement of the wearer. The word followed trousers into the plural, so one garment is a pair of crackers, not a cracker.
Showing meanings only.
crackers is a form of cracker
cracker, noun: A crisp, thin baked bread that is dry in texture and usually salty or savory, though some, such as graham and animal crackers, are sweet. Full entry
- Forms
- crackercrackers plural
- Spelling
- cracker → crackers: add -s
Practice
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Origin
From cracker + -ers. The South African sense takes its name from its sound, and is used only in the plural by association with "trousers". The adjective comes from British naval expressions about firecrackers in one's head, first "he's got the crackers", then "he's gone crackers", and finally today's "he is crackers".