Other forms: crouching, crouched, crouches
To crouch is to drop low with your knees bent and your heels off the ground. A photographer getting down to a child's height, a footballer waiting for the whistle, someone crouching to look under the sofa for a lost earring.
It nearly always takes down: crouch down beside the bed, crouch down behind the wall. The position is a ready one — a runner in the blocks, a cat before it springs — so crouching carries the sense that you are about to move. Do not mix it with kneeling, where your knees touch the ground, and do not mix it with sitting: in a crouch your feet still carry your weight. It works as a noun too, in a low crouch. And crouched is the form you meet most in writing: a figure crouched in the doorway.
1verbcrouchTo lower the body close to the ground by bending the knees, with the feet still taking the weight.
“She crouched behind the car until the headlights passed.”
2nounpositionA position in which the body is bent low with the knees folded.
“He moved along the ditch in a low crouch.”
Also accepted in games: squat
Crouch comes from Middle English crouchen, to bend, a variant of croken, to bend or crook. That came from crok, a hook, borrowed from Old Norse krókr, and back through Proto-Germanic *krōkaz to a Proto-Indo-European word *gerg- for wicker and bending. The body folded like a hook is the whole picture.
Proto-Indo-European
*gerg- — wicker, bend
Proto-Germanic
*krōkaz — hook
Old Norse
krókr — hook
Middle English
crouchen — to bend, crouch
English, today
crouch
Built from
From Middle English crouchen (“to bend, crouch”), variant of croken (“to bend, crook”), from crok (“crook, hook”), from Old Norse krókr (“hook”), from Proto-Germanic krōkaz (“hook”), from Proto-Indo-European gerg- (“wicker, bend”), from Proto-Indo-European ger- (“to turn, wind, weave”). Compare Middle Dutch kroken (“to crook, curl”). More at crook.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA