Other forms: cranes
A crane is the tall machine on a building site that lifts heavy things high into the air. A steel tower with a long arm swinging a pallet of bricks over the scaffolding.
The bird came first: a crane is a tall grey bird with long legs and a long neck, the one that dances in wetlands at first light. The machine took the name from the shape. Out of the same picture comes the verb — to crane your neck is to stretch it to see over the heads in front of you. Ports run different beasts again, gantry cranes on rails that pluck containers off a ship. In origami a paper crane is the folded bird, and a thousand of them is a wish.
1nouncraneA tall machine with a long arm for lifting and moving heavy loads.~61%
“A crane lifted the new boiler onto the roof of the school.”
2nounlargeA large bird with long legs, a long neck and a loud call.~37%
“Two cranes waded through the shallow end of the marsh.”
3verbstretchTo stretch your neck in order to see something.~2%
“People craned their necks to see who was getting out of the car.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 10 sentences found in the wild and placed 8 of them on a sense (2 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
crane is a lifting machine.
Crane was the bird first and for a long time: Old English cran, from Proto-Germanic *kranô, from a Proto-Indo-European root *gerh₂- meaning 'to cry hoarsely' — the bird named for its harsh call. The machines were named after the bird, for the long neck and the way the arm leans over a load. German still calls the machine a Kran.
Proto-Indo-European
*gerh₂- — to cry hoarsely
Proto-Germanic
*kranô — crane
Proto-West Germanic
*kran
Old English
cran — crane
Middle English
crane
English, today
crane
From Middle English crane, from Old English cran (“crane”), from Proto-West Germanic kran, kranō, from Proto-Germanic kranô (“crane”), from Proto-Indo-European gerh₂- (“to cry hoarsely”). Cognate with Scots cran (“crane”), Dutch kraan (“crane”), German Low German Kroon (“crane”), German Kran (“crane”). The mechanical devices are named from their likeness to the bird.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA