Word.ws English Dictionary

crawthumper

crawthumper noun: an ostentatiously pious person, especially a Roman Catholic.

Noun

crawthumper (plural crawthumpers)

  1. (Ireland, colloquial) An ostentatiously pious person, especially a Roman Catholic.
    • Those crawthumpers, now that's a good name for them, there's always something shiftylooking about them.1922 February 2, James Joyce, “[Episode 5: Lotus Eaters]”, in Ulysses, Paris: Shakespeare and Company […], →OCLC, part II [Odyssey], page 78
    Synonyms:
    voteen

Synonyms of crawthumper

Forms of crawthumper

pluralcrawthumpers

Origin of crawthumper

From craw + thumper, suggesting a person who is always beating their chest, a gesture of piety and submission.

Questions about crawthumper

What does crawthumper mean?
Crawthumper means an ostentatiously pious person, especially a Roman Catholic.
What part of speech is crawthumper?
Crawthumper is a noun.
What is the plural of crawthumper?
The plural of crawthumper is crawthumpers.

Words near crawthumper in the dictionary

  1. crawsful
  2. Crawshaw
  3. Crawshaws
  4. Crawshay
  5. Crawshays
  6. crawthumper
  7. crawthumpers
  8. crawthumping
  9. Craxi
  10. Craxism
  11. cray

Source and license

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