Word.ws English Dictionary

cruell

cruell is the obsolete spelling of cruel.

cruell is the obsolete spelling of crewel.

Meaning of cruel

Adjective

cruel (comparative crueler or crueller or more cruel, superlative cruelest or cruellest or most cruel)

  1. Intentionally causing or reveling in pain and suffering; merciless, heartless.
    • The supervisor was very cruel to Josh, as he would always give Josh the hardest, most degrading work he could find.
    Antonyms:
    merciful
  2. Harsh; severe.
    • We're certainly having quite a cruel winter this year.
  3. (slang) Cool; awesome; neat.

See all 6 meanings of cruel

Meaning of crewel

Noun

crewel (countable and uncountable, plural crewels)

  1. Worsted yarn, slackly twisted, used for embroidery.
    • First for a May-fly: you may make his body with greenish colored crewel or willowish color1653, Iz[aak] Wa[lton], The Compleat Angler or The Contemplative Man’s Recreation. Being a Discourse of Fish and Fishing, […], London: […] T. Maxey for Rich[ard] Marriot, […], →OCLC; reprinted as The...

See all 2 meanings of crewel

Forms of cruell

pluralcruells

Questions about cruell

What is cruell the obsolete spelling of?
Cruell is the obsolete spelling of cruel.

Words near cruell in the dictionary

  1. cruelheartedness
  2. cruelize
  3. cruelized
  4. cruelizes
  5. cruelizing
  6. cruell
  7. Cruella
  8. Cruellas
  9. cruelled
  10. crueller
  11. cruellest

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cruell (page history and authors); cruel (page history and authors); crewel (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: “cruell.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/cruell. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.