Other forms: crews, crewed, crewing
The crew is everybody who works the ship, the plane or the train — the ones in uniform, not the ones with tickets. Cabin crew coming down the aisle with the trolley; a crew of five on a fishing boat, up and out before it is light.
The word left the water long ago. A film has a camera crew and a sound crew, an airport has a ground crew, a motorway repair happens behind a works crew, and a lifeboat crew launches at three in the morning. It is a collective noun, so British English lets you say the crew are exhausted as readily as the crew is small. Informally it is your group of friends — me and my crew — and it turns up in crew cut, the very short haircut named after the rowing crews who wore it. One line to hold on to: on a plane the crew work there, and everybody else is a passenger.
1nouncrewAll the people who work on a ship, a plane or a train.~65%
“The crew were on deck before dawn.”
synonyms: staff, hands
2nounfilmA team of people working together on a job.~23%
“A camera crew followed her for a week.”
3noungroupA group of friends who go about together.~2%
“He turned up with his whole crew.”
4verbmemberTo work as a member of a crew.~10%
“She crewed on a yacht for two summers.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 177 sentences found in the wild and placed 138 of them on a sense (39 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Crew came from Old French creue, which meant an increase, a recruit, a military reinforcement — the extra men sent to make a force bigger. Behind it stands creistre, to grow, and behind that Latin cresco, to arise or grow. A crew was never a fixed thing to begin with. It was the amount a company had grown by.
Old French
creue
Middle English
crue
English, today
crew
Built from
From Middle English crue, from Old French creue. From Middle English crue, from Old French creue (“an increase, recruit, military reinforcement”), the feminine past participle of creistre (“grow”), from Latin cresco (“to arise, grow”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA