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PlainSpell

craw

UK /kɹɔː/noun

craw is a noun meaning “The crop of a bird” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled C-R-A-W and has one syllable, and it appears about once in every 4 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of craw is craws.

What does craw mean?

noun

  1. 1

    archaicThe stomach of an animal.

  2. 2

    The crop of a bird.

verb

  1. 1

    archaicTo caw, crow.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How do you pronounce craw?

  • UK /kɹɔː/
  • British /kɹoː/
  • /kɾɔ/

Craw has one syllable (counted from its American pronunciation in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary).

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: LL-Q1860_(eng)-Vealhurl-craw.wav, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).

Forms of craw

  • craws plural, present, singular, he/she/it
  • crag
  • crawing participle, present
  • crawed participle, past

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How common is craw?

Craw appears about once in every 4 million words in written English, the 60,838th most frequent word form in the list.

Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

Craw in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese

In the sense Crop of a bird:

LanguageWords
Frenchgoitre, jabot
Portuguesepapo

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.

Where does craw come from?

Late Middle English, also attested as craue, from or related to Old Norse *kravi (“neck, collar, gullet, crop of a bird”), of unclear origin (potentially cognate to crop), but historically a variation of kragi, the Norse analog of English crag. If craw and crag are cognates, then ultimately deriving from Proto-Germanic *kragô or Proto-West Germanic *kragō (“throat”), probably from Proto-Indo-European *gʷrogʰ- or *gʷrh₃-gʰ- (“throat, gullet”), whence also Proto-Celtic *brāgants (“throat, gullet”) and perhaps Ancient Greek βρόχθος (brókhthos, “throat”).

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).