Other forms: crackers
A cracker is a thin dry biscuit eaten with cheese. Cheese and crackers, a packet of crackers, cream crackers.
In British English crackers are savoury and biscuits are sweet, and calling a sweet biscuit a cracker will confuse people; in American English cracker covers both the savoury biscuit and, more widely, anything crisp. A Christmas cracker is the British paper tube that bangs and contains a paper hat and a bad joke. Note crackers as an informal British adjective meaning mad, and cracking, meaning excellent.
1nouncrackerA thin dry biscuit eaten with cheese.
“We served crackers with a plate of cheese and grapes.”
2nounpaperA paper tube that bangs when pulled apart.
“Every cracker had the same joke in it.”
cracker is a biscuit, or a party tube.
Middle English craker meant a boaster — somebody who cracked on, or talked loudly. The biscuit was named for the noise it makes, and the Christmas cracker for a much louder one.
Middle English
craker
English, today
cracker
Built from
From Middle English craker. From Middle English craker (“a boaster”), equivalent to crack + er. From crack, the sound made when one is broken. The hard "bread" and "biscuit" sense is first attested in 1739. The computing senses of cracker, crack, and cracking were promoted in the 1980s as an alternative to hacker, by programmers concerned about negative public associations of hack, hacking (“creative computer coding”). See Citations:cracker.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA