Word.ws English Dictionary

by crumbs

by crumbs prepositional phrase: used as an intensifier; by God.

Prepositional phrase

  1. (dated) Used as an intensifier; by God.
    • He scratched his head. "Well, damn me," said he. "I never thought I would take orders from a Chink, but he says 'hist!' and by crums you've got to hist and no back talk either."1925 July – 1926 May, A[rthur] Conan Doyle, “De Profundis”, in The Land of Mist (eBook no. 0601351h.html), Australia: Project Gutenberg Australia, published April 2019
    • By Crums, they might get the salts and oxalic acid mixed up if they came to treat me, for there’s no love lost between us.1895, A[rthur] Conan Doyle, The Stark Munro Letters: […], London: Longmans, Green, and Co., →OCLC

Forms of by crumbs

alternative formby crums
alternative formby Crums

Questions about by crumbs

What does by crumbs mean?
By crumbs means used as an intensifier; by God.
What part of speech is by crumbs?
By crumbs is a prepositional phrase.

Words near by crumbs in the dictionary

  1. by cock and pie
  2. by committee
  3. by common consent
  4. by comparison
  5. by contrast
  6. by crumbs
  7. by crums
  8. by day
  9. by default
  10. by definition
  11. by degrees

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: by crumbs (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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