crew
Pluralcrews
Pluralcrews
- 1The group of people, often paid staff, who operate a large facility or vehicle such as a ship, plane, or spacecraft.
The flight crew prepared the cabin before takeoff.
Mission control stayed in constant contact with the crew aboard the station.
UsageTakes a singular or plural verb: the crew was ready, the crew were exhausted. For one person, say a crew member.
Similarstaff, personnel, complement
- 2A group of people who work together on a particular job, such as the team behind the scenes of a film or show.
A road crew patched the potholes before the morning rush.
The moving crew loaded the truck in under two hours.
UsageUsually with the job in front: road crew, film crew, cleanup crew, or a crew of volunteers.
- 3A person who is a member of a crew, on a ship, plane or production, especially one below the officers.
He served as crew on the tanker for eighteen months.
After two seasons as crew on a cargo ship, she studied for her officer's license.
UsageCounts people with no -s: five crew survived, while crews counts whole teams. Usually after a number or in serve as crew, rarely with a.
- 4
- 5A group of people who perform hip-hop music or breakdancing together.
Their crew earned respect for inventing moves nobody had seen before.
She joined a crew of b-boys who trained in an abandoned warehouse.
Similartroupe
Note
Slang from hip-hop, where the word names the group behind the music or the dance. Run-DMC call themselves a crew in King of Rock (1985), and Cary Darling still set "crews" in quotation marks in 1988. It covers rappers and deejays as readily as dancers. Among b-boys and b-girls, a crew is the group that dances and battles together, and a newcomer joins the crew.
Checked 5 Nov 2026 · 5 facts
- The hip-hop group sense is slang associated with hip-hop. en.wiktionary.org
- Run-DMC call themselves a crew in King of Rock. en.wiktionary.org
- King of Rock was first released in 1985. en.wikipedia.org
- The journalist's name is Cary Darling. latimes.com
- Darling used quotation marks around crews in a 1988 article. latimes.com
- 6A set of people lumped together and viewed collectively with disapproval by the speaker.
That crew down at the bar is always causing trouble.
He fell in with a rough crew after dropping out.
UsageOften with that or a scornful adjective: that crew, a rough crew, a sorry crew.
Note
William Weston Patton's 1861 John Brown's Body verses call the hangmen a "traitor crew", and Bernard Nicholas Schilling's Conservative England and the Case Against Voltaire (1950), summing up the conservative case, blames an "abandoned crew of philosophers". Calling people a crew lumps them together so that the speaker never has to tell them apart.
Less common meanings
- 7To work as a member of a crew, especially on a boat or ship, or on a film or show.
They crew the racing yacht together every summer.
She crews on a tall ship during the festival season.
UsageWorks with or without an object: crew on a fishing boat, or crew the boat itself.
Note
In the passive, the sailors become the agent, as in a ship crewed by fifty sailors. That keeps it apart from the staffing sense, where the subject is whoever supplies the sailors: Steele crewed the boat with men from his own regiment.
- 8A team of rowers who work together to power and steer a single racing shell.
The crew pulled in perfect rhythm down the final stretch.
Three crews lined up at the start, oars poised above the water.
Similarteam
Note
A rowing crew belongs to one boat, and it is thought of as individuals as readily as a unit. W. B. Woodgate's Boating (1888) advises that if a crew feather badly under water, you should "seat them in a row on a bench" and give each man a stick to handle as an oar. The pronoun turns plural because the coach is correcting rowers, not the boat.
Checked 5 Nov 2026 · 3 facts
- W. B. Woodgate wrote Boating, published in 1888. gutenberg.org
- Woodgate recommends seating the rowers on a bench and giving each a stick to practise correcting underwater feathering; the quoted wording is exact. gutenberg.org
- Boating was published in 1888. en.wikipedia.org
- 9The sport of competitive rowing, in which teams race boats propelled by oars.
Many students take up crew to compete in spring regattas.
She earned a scholarship after years of rowing crew.
UsageNo article, like other sports: row crew, go out for crew, join crew.
Similarrowing
Note
In American schools and colleges, crew is the sport itself, listed beside basketball and fencing in the University of Virginia's 1973 Undergraduate Record. Students go out for crew: Benjamin Spock recalls two classmates who "went out for crew" in their freshman year at Yale in Spock on Spock (1989).
- 10To provide a ship, boat or production with the people who make up its crew.
The agency helps producers crew their films at short notice.
Owners scrambled to crew the fleet before the season opened.
UsageUsually crew a ship or film with people: crewed the vessel with experienced sailors.
- 11Any company of people gathered together; a throng or assemblage.
Faithful to whom? to thy rebellious crew?
1667, John Milton, Paradise LostThere a noble crew / Of Lordes and Ladies stood on every side.
1590, Edmund Spenser, The Faerie QueeneNote
Here the word means any gathering at all, with no work attached: Spenser's "noble crew / Of Lordes and Ladies" in The Faerie Queene (1590) is simply a crowd. Milton's "rebellious crew" in Paradise Lost (1667) already leans toward the scornful tone that survives in the dismissive "that lot" sense.
- 12Past tense of crow. Archaic and chiefly British; the usual form is crowed.
And, as the Cock crew, those who stood before The Tavern shouted — "Open then the Door! You know how little while we have to stay, And, once departed, may return no more."
1859, Edward Fitzgerald, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám: The Astronomer-Poet of PersiaIt was still dark when the cock crew.
Note
A strong past tense, formed with a vowel change much like blew from blow. It belongs to crow the verb, not to the black bird or the iron bar that share that spelling. Edward Fitzgerald's Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859) has "as the Cock crew". Everyday modern English prefers crowed, so crew now sounds archaic, and it has no tie to the shipboard word.
Checked 5 Nov 2026 · 9 facts
- Crew is a strong past tense of crow. en.wikipedia.org
- Strong past tenses involve a change of stem vowel. en.wikipedia.org
- Blew is the past tense of blow. en.wiktionary.org
- Crew here is an inflection of the rooster-sound verb crow. en.wiktionary.org
- Crow also names a usually black bird. en.wiktionary.org
- Crow also names an iron bar. en.wiktionary.org
- Edward FitzGerald's English Rubáiyát was first published in 1859. en.wikipedia.org
- The quoted words occur in the poem. rpo.library.utoronto.ca
- The shipboard noun crew has a separate origin. en.wiktionary.org
- 13The Manx shearwater, a black-and-white seabird that nests in burrows and ranges widely over the open ocean.
Similarshearwater
Note
A dated regional name for the bird, and a separate word from the crews of ships and stages, not one of their meanings.
- 14A group of Rovers: members of the senior, young-adult section of the Scouting movement.
- 15A pen or enclosure for keeping livestock such as chickens or pigs.
Between the shippon and the pig-crew, with the wind blowing over from the vegetable ground.
2004, Gillian Cross, On the Edge
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Origin
Latin crescere ("to arise, grow") gave Old French creistre ("to grow"), whose feminine past participle creue ("an increase, recruit, military reinforcement") was taken into Middle English as crue.