Other forms: crowbars
A crowbar is the heavy iron bar with a flattened, split end that you use as a lever to force things apart. Prising the lid off a crate, pulling nails out of a floorboard, a burglar going at a window in every film you have ever seen.
The split end is the claw: slide it under a nail head, lean on the other end, and the nail comes up. Americans say pry bar or wrecking bar for the same tool, and the short one a thief carries is a jemmy in Britain, a jimmy in the States. Crowbar works as a verb too, and almost always about force where force does not belong — a writer crowbars a joke into a quiet scene, a company crowbars its new logo onto everything. Size matters to the name: a crowbar is a two-handed thing, so the little curved claw on the back of a hammer is not one. Write it as a single word, no hyphen.
1nouncrowbarA long iron or steel bar with a flattened, usually split end, used as a lever to force things open or pull out nails.
“He worked the crowbar under the lid and leaned his weight on it.”
synonyms: pry bar, wrecking bar, jemmy
2verbplaceTo force something into a place where it does not really fit.
“The studio crowbarred a love story into a film about submarines.”
crowbar is a hand tool.
Crowbar is exactly what it looks like: crow plus bar. The forked, two-pronged end was seen as a crow's foot, and the name stuck to the whole bar. Nothing to do with the noise the bird makes.
From crow + bar. From crow + bar, probably because the forked end looks like a crow's foot.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in Around the House, Tools & DIY