Crevasse or crevice?
crevasse is a noun meaning “A crack or fissure in a glacier or snowfield; a chasm”; crevice is a noun meaning “A narrow crack or fissure, as in a rock or wall”. In written English (wordfreq, 2021 data) crevice is about 1.8 times as common as crevasse.
What is the difference between crevasse and crevice?
| crevasse | crevice | |
|---|---|---|
| Part of speech | noun, verb | noun, verb |
| Meaning | A crack or fissure in a glacier or snowfield; a chasm USA breach in a canal or river bank To form crevasses | A narrow crack or fissure, as in a rock or wall To crack; to flaw |
| Example | […] he laments that he can find no physiological phenomenon answering to his subject’s winning a race, or losing it. Between his terminal… | 16 March, 1926, Virginia Woolf, letter to V. Sackville-West I can't tell you how urbane and sprightly the old poll parrot was; and […] not… |
| Forms | crevasses | crevices |
| Pronunciation | /kɹəˈvæs/ | /ˈkɹɛvɪs/ |
| In writing | about once in every 4 million words | about once in every 2 million words |
Sources: crevasse and crevice in the English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0); written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
Every current meaning of crevasse and crevice
crevasse
- 1
A crack or fissure in a glacier or snowfield; a chasm
- 2
To form crevasses
- 3
USA breach in a canal or river bank
- 4
To fissure with crevasses
- 5
Any cleft or fissure
- 6
A discontinuity or “gap” between the accounted variables and an observed outcome
[…] he laments that he can find no physiological phenomenon answering to his subject’s winning a race, or losing it. Between his terminal output of energy and his victory or…
crevice
- 1
A narrow crack or fissure, as in a rock or wall
16 March, 1926, Virginia Woolf, letter to V. Sackville-West I can't tell you how urbane and sprightly the old poll parrot was; and […] not a pocket, not a crevice, of pomp…
- 2
To crack; to flaw
- 3
slangThe vagina
Source: the English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0); obsolete, archaic, dialect and rare senses left out.
Which is more common, crevasse or crevice?
crevasse appears about once in every 4 million words; crevice about once in every 2 million words.
crevasse about once in every 4 million wordscrevice about once in every 2 million words
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
How many people search crevasse vs crevice?
“crevasse vs crevice” is searched about 2,900 times a month on Google and 90 on Bing in the United States. Google counts close variants of a query together (“crevice vs crevasse”, “crevasse or crevice”).
Sources: Google Ads keyword data through DataForSEO and Microsoft Advertising keyword data through DataForSEO, the average month from September 2025 to August 2026.