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kraken

UK/ˈkɹæ.kən/US/ˈkɹæ.kən/
nounB2+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #9,537 of 15,258neutral

The kraken is a vast sea monster said to drag ships under. Release the kraken, the legend of the kraken, a kraken attack.

It comes from Norwegian sailors' accounts and was described in the eighteenth century as an island-sized creature with arms that could pull down a ship. The giant squid, which is real and reaches thirteen metres, is the likeliest thing behind it. Release the kraken is from a 1981 film and is now used for any dramatic escalation. Note that the plural is kraken.

Pierre Denys de Montfort (1766–1820) / Étienne Claude Voysard (1746–1812.) · Public domain

Definitions of kraken

  1. 1nounkrakenA vast sea monster said to drag ships under.B2+

    “The kraken was described as about the size of an island.”

kraken is a legendary sea monster.

Where it comes from

  1. Proto-Germanic

    *krankaz — crooked

  2. Old Norse

    kraki — crooked dead tree, wooden drag/grapnel

  3. Norwegian

    kraken

  4. English

    Kraken

  5. English, today

    kraken

Kraken Borrowed from Norwegian kraken (Bokmål entry; Nynorsk entry), definite singular of krake (“crooked dead tree, wooden drag/grapnel”) (Bokmål entry; Nynorsk entry), both from Old Norse kraki (“crooked dead tree, wooden drag/grapnel”) literally “crookie: something with crooks/hooks”, from Proto-Germanic krankaz (“crooked”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Myths & Legends, Fairy Tales & Folklore

Practise this word

kraken in the wild

  • USS Kraken, a Balao-class submarine, was a ship of the United States Navy named for the kraken, a legendary sea monster believed to haunt the coasts of Norway.

    USS Kraken

  • Carl Linnaeus may have indirectly written about the kraken.

    Kraken

  • Subsequent authors have referred to Linnaeus's writing, and the writings of Thomas Bartholin's cetus called hafgufa, and Christian Franz Paullini's monstrum marinum as "krakens".

    Kraken

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.