1 (disapproving) a person with ideas that other people find strange:
Vegetarians are no longer dismissed as cranks. * Everybody famous gets crank calls and letters.
2 (AmE) a person who easily gets angry or annoyed:
The old crank next door can't stand the sound of our lawnmower.
3 a bar and handle in the shape of an L that you pull or turn to produce movement in a machine, etc.
verb [VN] ~ sth (up) to make sth turn or move by using a crank:
to crank an engine * (figurative) He has a limited time to crank the reforms into action.
PHRASALVERBS
crank sth<->out (AmE, informal) to produce a lot of sth quickly, especially things of low quality
SYNTURNOUT
crank sth<->up (informal)
1 to make a machine, etc. work or work at a higher level
2 to make music, etc. louder
SYNTURNUP:
Crank up the volume!
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About this entry
This is a English–English dictionary entry.
Sourced from Main Dictionary in Lughet's collection.
This word also appears under other sources in Lughet's collection — see the list below.
This entry for crank is sourced from Main Dictionary, one of the dictionaries and corpora merged into Lughet.
Is crank a noun, verb, or something else?
In this entry, crank is tagged as noun.
Does crank appear elsewhere on Lughet?
Yes — crank appears under other sources or language pairs in Lughet's collection. See the list below.
What is Lughet?
Lughet is a free trilingual dictionary covering nearly five million entries across Uyghur, Chinese, and English, drawn from more than ten source dictionaries and corpora.
