Meaning of Crimp | Babel Free

Definitions

1. A fastener or a fastening method that secures parts by bending metal around a joint and squeezing it together, often with a tool that adds indentations to capture the parts.
2. An agent who procures seamen, soldiers, etc., especially by decoying, entrapping, impressing, or seducing them.
3. The natural curliness of wool fibres.
4. One who infringes sub-section 1 of the Merchant Shipping Act 1854, applied to a person other than the owner, master, etc., who engages seamen without a license from the Board of Trade.
   specifically
5. Hair that is shaped so it bends back and forth in many short kinks.
   plural-normally
6. A keeper of a low lodging house where sailors and emigrants are entrapped and fleeced.
   obsolete
7. A card game.
   obsolete
8. A small hold with little surface area.
9. A grip on such a hold.

Equivalents

Examples

“The strap was held together by a simple metal crimp.”

“Lady Loadstone: Laugh, and keep company, at gleek or crimp. / Mistress Polish: Your ladyship says right, crimp sure will cure her.”

“Indeed, when a maſter of a ſhip, ſuppoſe at Jamaica, hath loſt any of his hands, he applies of courſe to a crimp[…]who makes it his buſineſs to ſeduce the men belonging to ſome other ſhip,”

“Walking the street very hungry, and not knowing what to do with himself, a crimp's bill was put into his hand, offering immediate entertainment and encouragement to such as would bind themselves to serve in America. He went directly, sign'd the indentures, was put into the ship, and came over, never writing a line to acquaint his friends what was become of him.”

“Among his men I recollected one Cordus, a gentleman's ſon from Hamburgh, in which character I had known him, and who had been trepanned into the Weſt India Company's ſervice by the crimps or ſilver-coopers as a common ſoldier.”

“Jack and Metsy at Portsmouth, fitting out the vessel, and offering three guineas ahead to the crimps for every good able seaman”

“I hear there are plenty of good men stowed away by the crimps at different places.”

“As Count Antoine was in the habit of sallying forth at night[…]he came near being carried off by a gang of crimps”

“The World Went Very Well Then—in the high and palmy days of the crimp, the pirate, the press-gang, and the smuggler—is a case in point.”

CEFR level