Word.ws English Dictionary

cranny

/ˈkɹæni/

cranny noun: a small, narrow opening, fissure, crevice, or chink, as in a wall, or other substance.

Noun (1)

cranny (plural crannies)

  1. A small, narrow opening, fissure, crevice, or chink, as in a wall, or other substance.
    • Down thro the Cranies of the living Walls / The Crystal Streams descend in murm'ring Falls1697, Virgil, “The First Book of the Æneis”, in John Dryden, transl., The Works of Virgil: Containing His Pastorals, Georgics, and Æneis. […], London: […] Jacob Tonson, […], →OCLC, page 208, line 237
    • [H]e peep'd into every Cranny; ſometimes he admir'd the Beauty of the Architecture, and the vaſt Solidity of the Maſon's VVork; at other Times he commended the Symmetry and Proportion of the Rooms.1733, Humphry Polesworth [pseudonym; John Arbuthnot], Alexander Pope, compiler, “Law is a Bottomless Pit. Or, The History of John Bull. […]. The Second Part. Chapter XXII. Of the Great Joy that John...
  2. A tool for forming the necks of bottles, etc.

Verb

cranny (third-person singular simple present crannies, present participle crannying, simple past and past participle crannied)

  1. (intransitive) To break into, or become full of, crannies.
    • The ground did cranie everie where and light did pierce to hell.1567, Arthur Golding: Ovid's Metamophoses; Bk. 2, line 333
  2. (intransitive) To haunt or enter by crannies.
    • All tenantless, save to the crannying wind.1812–1818, Lord Byron, “(please specify |canto=I to IV)”, in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. , London: John Murray,, (please specify the stanza number)

Noun (2)

cranny (plural crannies)

  1. (India, obsolete) A clerk writing English.
  2. (India, obsolete) A member of the East Indians, or mixed-race people, from among whom English copyists were chiefly recruited.

cranny meaning in Urdu and Malayalam

cranny in Urdu

دراز, جھری, روزن, شق

cranny in Malayalam

crack, chink, crevice
വിള്ളൽ, വിള്ളിച്ച, രന്ധ്രം, പൊട്ടൽ, ഖണ്ഡം, ഭംഗം

Examples of cranny in a sentence

  • Muffins are tastiest when butter seeps into all the nooks and crannies.
  • Everyone helped out to clean every nook and cranny of the house.
  • Cleaning this equipment really isn't hard except that getting into all the nooks and crannies is time-consuming.

All 22 example sentences with cranny

Forms of cranny

Noun
pluralcrannies
Verb
third-person singular presentcrannies
present participlecrannying
past participlecrannied
pastcrannied

Origin of cranny

From Middle English crany, crani (“cranny”), apparently a diminutive of *cran (+ -y), from Old French cran, cren (“notch, fissure”), a derivative of crener (“to notch, split”), from Medieval Latin crenō (“split”, verb), from Vulgar Latin *crinō (“split, break”, verb), of obscure origin; according to Watkins, of Gaulish origin, from Proto-Celtic *krīnos (“decayed, withered”). Despite a spurious use in Pliny, connection to Latin crēna (“notch, incision”) is doubtful. Instead, probably of Germanic or Celtic origin. Compare Old High German chrinna (“notch, groove, crevice”), Alemannic German Krinne (“small crack, channel, groove”), Low German karn (“notch, groove, crevice, cranny”), Old Irish ara-chrinin (“to perish, decay”).

Borrowed from Hindustani किरानी (kirānī) / کِرانِی (kirānī).

Phrases with cranny

Words that rhyme with cranny

4 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about cranny

What does cranny mean?
Cranny means a small, narrow opening, fissure, crevice, or chink, as in a wall, or other substance.
What is cranny in Urdu?
Cranny in Urdu is دراز, جھری, روزن. See Cranny meaning in Urdu.
What part of speech is cranny?
Cranny can be a noun or a verb.
How do you pronounce cranny?
Cranny is pronounced /ˈkɹæni/.
What is the plural of cranny?
The plural of cranny is crannies.

Words near cranny in the dictionary

  1. crannocks
  2. crannog
  3. crannoge
  4. crannoges
  5. crannogs
  6. cranny
  7. crannying
  8. crano
  9. cranoglanidid
  10. cranoglanidids
  11. Cranor

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cranny (page history and authors); cranny (Urdu Wiktionary) (page history and authors); cranny (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license). 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)-Vealhurl-cranny.wav.

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