scrat

English

Pronunciation
  • IPA(key): /skɹæt/
  • Audio (Southern England)(file)
  • Rhymes: -æt

Etymology 1

From Middle English scratten. Origin uncertain; apparently related to Swedish kratta (“to rake”). Also compare German kratzen (“to scratch”).

Verb

scrat (third-person singular simple present scrats, present participle scratting, simple past and past participle scratted)

  1. (obsolete) To scratch; to use one's nails or claws.
    • 1624, Democritus Junior [pseudonym; Robert Burton], The Anatomy of Melancholy: […], 2nd edition, Oxford, Oxfordshire: Printed by John Lichfield and James Short, for Henry Cripps, →OCLC:
      , New York Review of Books, 2001, p.286:
      Euclio […] as he went from home, seeing a crow scrat upon the muck-hill, returned in all haste, taking it for malum omen, an ill sign […].
  2. (obsolete, UK) To rake; to search.
    • 1978, A.S. Byatt, The Virgin in The Garden, Vintage International, published 1992, page 89:
      He himself had scratted in the thin dust of evangelical tracts.

Etymology 2

Compare Old English scritta (“a hermaphrodite”), which had an earlier sense of "effeminate person, castrated man," presumably related to sċieran (“to cut”). Liberman notes that Germanic glossators, not familiar with Ovid, did not know exactly how to translate Latin hermaphroditus and instead matched it with more native words related to sexual deficiencies.[1]

Noun

scrat (plural scrats)

  1. (obsolete) A hermaphrodite.
    • 1649, Thomas Johnson, The Workes of that Famous Chirurgion Ambrose Parey:
      three on the right side for males , three on the left side for femals , and one in the midst for Hermophrodices or Scrats

References
  1. An Analytic Dictionary of the English Etymology: An Introduction. (n.d.). United Kingdom: U of Minnesota Press, p. 59

Etymology 3

From Middle English scrat, from Old English *scrætt, from Proto-Germanic *skrattuz (“troll, forest monster”). Compare German Schratt and Old Norse skratti.

Noun

scrat (plural scrats)

  1. (obsolete) A devil.

Part or all of this entry has been imported from the 1913 edition of Webster’s Dictionary, which is now free of copyright and hence in the public domain. The imported definitions may be significantly out of date, and any more recent senses may be completely missing.
(See the entry for “scrat”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.)

Anagrams
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