crud

Forms

crud m or n (feminine singular crudă, masculine plural cruzi, feminine/neuter plural crude)^[1]

Etymology

It is inherited from Latin crūdus (“raw, bloody; cruel”), a word kept throughout Romance.^{[2][3][4][5][6]} DELR connects the Latin word with a root crū- “blood”, as in cruor (“blood”) and cruentus (“bloody”), so that its first sense was “in blood, bloody”.^[3] De Vaan reconstructs a Proto-Italic *krowoþo- and, with a query, a PIE *kreuh₂-odʰ-o- (“raw”), and Wiktionary calls the further origin disputed.^[7][1]

The word survives in Aromanian and Megleno-Romanian: Aromanian crud and Megleno-Romanian crud.^[2][8][5] Its Romance cognates include Italian crudo, Spanish crudo, French cru, Occitan cru and Portuguese cru.^[2][5]

Earliest recorded meaning

DELR's first record is the personal name Crudul in a Slavonic document of 1557.^[3] A Slavonic–Romanian lexicon of about 1660 has crud for “green or not”, i.e. unripe, and cruzi for Slavonic “raw”.^[9] MDA2 dates the word to Dosoftei's Lives of the Saints of 1682–1686.^[4]

Semantic evolution

The physical senses come first in the dictionaries: food that is not cooked, then fruit that is not ripe, and plants that have only just come up.^[10][11] From the young plant the word passed to people and animals of tender age, and further to “naive, inexperienced”; old texts also use it for “recent, fresh”.^[10][4] Of materials it means “raw, unworked”: green wood, untanned hide, unsmelted ore.^[4][11] The figurative “cruel” was already Latin.^[7]

The derivatives cruzime “cruelty” (about 1650), crudătate (1694, from Latin cruditas) and crudelitate (Dosoftei, 1682, from Latin crudelitas) show the sense “cruel”;^[3] cruditate (1862) is from French crudité.^[3] The Transylvanian Saxons borrowed the word as krud(ich).^[2]

Timeline

• 1557 – the personal name Crudul, the first record.^[3]
• c. 1650 – cruzime “cruelty”.^[3]
• c. 1660 – crud “unripe” and cruzi “raw” in a Slavonic–Romanian lexicon.^[9]
• 1682 – crudelitate in Dosoftei.^[3]
• 1682–1686 – crud in Dosoftei's Lives of the Saints.^[4]
• 1688 – the word in the Bucharest Bible, e.g. for meat eaten raw.^[12]
• 1709–1716 – cruzie “cruelty” in Antim.^[3]
• 1837 – the diminutive crudșor.^[3]
• 1862 – cruditate.^[3]

Meanings

Adjective

1. Of food: raw, not cooked, or not cooked enough.^[11]
2. Of fruit: unripe, green; of plants, still growing, tender; of people and animals, very young, tender.^[11][4]
3. Of materials: crude, unworked.^[11]
4. (figurative) cruel, merciless; relentless.^[11]
5. (figurative) Violent, bloody, fierce: o luptă crudă “a fierce battle”.^[11]

Word family

• crudac
• crudicel
• crudșor
• cruduț
• cruzie
• cruzime
• cruzătură

Related words

• cruditate
• Aromanian crud
• Latin crūdus

Usage notes

An old saying, a trăi cruda cu nesărata, means to live through good and bad, but mostly bad.^[4][10]

References

1. ^ a b c Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d Ciorănescu, Alexandru (1958–1966), Diccionario etimológico rumano, La Laguna: Universidad de La Laguna (Romanian ed.: Dicționarul etimologic al limbii române, București: Saeculum, 2001), p. s.v. crud
3. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Academia Română, Institutul de Lingvistică „Iorgu Iordan – Al. Rosetti” (2011–), Dicționarul etimologic al limbii române (DELR), vol. I: A–B (2011), vol. II: C (2015–2018), București: Editura Academiei Române; continued online at delr.lingv.ro, p. s.v. crud
4. ^ a b c d e f g Academia Română, Institutul de Lingvistică „Iorgu Iordan – Al. Rosetti” (2010), Micul dicționar academic, 2nd ed., 4 vols., București: Univers Enciclopedic Gold, p. 1, 558
5. ^ a b c Pușcariu, Sextil (1905), Etymologisches Wörterbuch der rumänischen Sprache I: Lateinisches Element, Heidelberg: Carl Winter, p. 36
6. ^ Meyer-Lübke, Wilhelm (1935), Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 3rd ed., Heidelberg: Winter, p. 2342
7. ^ a b de Vaan, Michiel (2008), Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages, Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 7, Leiden; Boston: Brill
8. ^ Papahagi, Tache (1963), Dicționarul dialectului aromân, general și etimologic, București: Editura Academiei Republicii Populare Romîne, p. 313
9. ^ a b Ungureanu, Mădălina; Gînsac, Ana-Maria; Moruz, Alexandru (eds.), eRomLex: The First Romanian Bilingual Dictionaries (17th century), Iași: Universitatea „Alexandru Ioan Cuza”, https://scriptadacoromanica.ro, p. s.v. crud
10. ^ a b c Academia Română (1913–1949), Dicționarul limbii române (DA), ed. Sextil Pușcariu, tom I (A–B, C, D–De) and tom II (F–I, J–Lojniță), București: Socec / Universul / Monitorul Oficial și Imprimeriile Statului; page scans at cflr-scans.solirom.ro, p. s.v. crud
11. ^ a b c d e f g DEX (2009), Dicționarul explicativ al limbii române [Explanatory dictionary of the Romanian language], Bucharest: Editura Univers Enciclopedic, p. 254
12. ^ Biblia, adecă Dumnezeiasca Scriptură a ceii vechi și a ceii noao leage, București, 1688 (ed. 1988, tricentennial edition), p. Exodus 12:9