Word.ws English Dictionary

crabber

crabber noun: a person who catches crabs.

Noun (1)

crabber (plural crabbers)

  1. A person who catches crabs.
    • Many shrimpers complain that the crabbers place their traps too close together and that they can't go between the traps without snagging their nets.1989, National Fisherman, volumes 70-71, page 26
  2. A boat used for catching crabs.
    • In the bright haze of morning they came into Hort Harbor, where a hundred craft were moored or setting forth: fishermen's boats, crabbers, trawlers, trading-ships, two galleys of twenty oars […]1972, Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
    • It is standard practice for search and rescue authorities to ask other vessels in the area to assist. Usually, this is done. The weather on the night of 31 December was too atrocious, and when at 11pm the Coast Guard asked the crabber Ruff & Reddy to head to the scene, its skipper refused, as a...2025 October 21, Rose George, “‘I knew in my head we were dying’: the last voyage of the Scandies Rose”, in The Guardian

Noun (2)

crabber (plural crabbers)

  1. A person who finds fault or criticizes.
    • There were one or two crabbers, of course—people who wanted his job—but no one paid any attention to the likes of them.1936, Josephine Tey, A Shilling for Candles, New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, published 1998, →ISBN, page 103

Synonyms of crabber

20 more synonymsFewer synonyms

All synonyms of crabber

Forms of crabber

pluralcrabbers

Origin of crabber

From crab (“crustacean having five pairs of legs”) + -er (occupational suffix) or + -er (relational noun suffix).

From crab (“to be ill-tempered; to complain or find fault”) + -er.

Questions about crabber

What does crabber mean?
Crabber means a person who catches crabs.
What part of speech is crabber?
Crabber is a noun.
What is the plural of crabber?
The plural of crabber is crabbers.

Words near crabber in the dictionary

  1. Crabbean
  2. crabbed
  3. crabbedly
  4. crabbedness
  5. crabbednesses
  6. crabber
  7. crabberies
  8. crabbers
  9. crabbery
  10. Crabbes
  11. Crabbes Creek

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: crabber (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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-crabber.wav.

Cite this entry: “crabber.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/crabber. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.