scram

UK/skɹæm/US/skɹæm/

verbC2Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speech — scramble sits at #5,433mostly spokeninformal · an editor’s judgement

Other forms: scrammed

Scram means leave at once. Barked at somebody you want gone.

It is informal, slightly dated and almost always an instruction rather than a description, so shouting at children to scram is the classic use. It has a cheerful quality that stops it being genuinely aggressive. Clear off and get lost do the same job in British English. There is an entirely unrelated technical sense in nuclear engineering, where a scram is an emergency shutdown of a reactor.

Definitions of scram

1verbscramTo leave quickly, used as an order.C2
“Go on, scram, before somebody sees you.”

Also accepted in games: clear off, get lost

Where it comes from

Scram began with claws. The word is a variant of dialectal scramb, to rake together with the hands or scratch with the nails, related to Dutch schrammen, to graze or scratch.

Probably either:

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

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