Other forms: crisps
Crisp means firm and dry and ready to break — the kind of thing that snaps cleanly instead of bending. A fresh apple, bacon left in the pan a minute longer, a lettuce leaf straight out of cold water.
The word travels a long way from food. A crisp morning is cold, dry and bright; a crisp shirt has been ironed and holds its shape; a crisp photograph has no blur in it; a crisp reply is short and businesslike and just this side of rude. What all of them share is edges — nothing soft, nothing soggy, nothing trailing off. In Britain a crisp is also a thin fried slice of potato out of a bag, which Americans call a chip, and the two countries have been confusing each other about it for a century.
1adjectivecrispFirm and dry, breaking with a clean snap instead of bending.~14%
“The apples were cold and crisp.”
Patterncrisp + noun (pastry, skin, lettuce) · nice and crisp · go / stay crisp · crisp up · crispy
2adjectivefreshCold, dry and fresh, said of air or weather.~20%
“It was a crisp morning with frost on the grass.”
3adjectivesharpClean and sharp, with nothing soft or blurred about it.~25%
“He handed over three crisp new notes.”
4nounthinA thin fried slice of potato sold in a bag. British; Americans say chip.~41%
“She opened a bag of crisps on the train.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 177 sentences found in the wild and placed 65 of them on a sense (112 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
CRISP → a CRISP from the bag: snap
Bite a fresh crisp from the bag: it breaks with a clean snap, and never bends.
Proto-Indo-European
*(s)ker-
English, today
crisp
The adjective is derived partly from the following:
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA