curd / crud / cruddy

Most Americans today only see curd in descriptions of cottage cheese, in the nursery rhyme Little Miss Muffet, or in the verb form to curdle. The word in its original sense referred to the soft, white solid formed when milk or cream coagulates, but it has acquired additional senses over the centuries. First recorded in the form crud, by the late fifteenth century we start seeing the form curd, formed by metathesis, the transposition of phonemes in a word.

Its origin is obscure, first appearing in the late fourteenth century, probably from a Germanic root. It may be from an unattested Old English noun or it could be borrowing from Old Norse; Norwegian has the regional terms krodda, boiled cheese, and krodde, dregs or curds, which are undoubtedly related to the English word, but exactly how is uncertain.

One of the earliest attested uses of curd, or in this case crud, is in William Langland’s late fourteenth-century poem Piers Plowman:

“Y behote the,” quod Hunger, “that hennes ne wol Y wende
Ar Y haue ydyned be this day and ydronke bothe.”
“Y haue no peny,’ quod Peres, “polettes for to begge,
Ne nother goos ne gries but two grene cheses
And a fewe croddes and craym and a cake of otes
And bred for my barnes of benes and of peses.”

(“I assure you,” said Hunger, “that hence I will not go
Before I have both dined and drunk this very day.”
“I have no penny,” said Piers, “with which to buy pullets,
Neither geese nor suckling pigs, but two green cheeses
And a few curds and cream and a cake of oats
And bread of beans and peas for my children.”)

By the early fifteenth century curd was being used to refer to any coagulated substance, not just milk. From a cookbook written c. 1425:

Jussel enforsed.

Take brothe of capons withoute herbes, and breke eyren, and cast into the pot, and make a crudde thereof, and colour hit with saffron, and then presse oute the brothe and kerve it on leches.

The adjective cruddy appears toward the end of the fourteenth century in the sense of curd-like. We see it John Trevisa’s translation of Bartholomæus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum (On the Properties of Things) in a description of testicles and how semen was thought to be formed within the body:

Constantinus seiþ þat þe substaunce of þe stones is imade of vddry and cruddy fleisch, white, neische, and nouȝt ful sad and hard, and þat is for kepinge and sauynge of hete and for chaunginge of blood into whitenes. And þat is by strong hete in here substauns þat seþith þe blood and turneþ it and makeþ it white.

(Constantinus says that the substance of the stones [i.e., testicles] is made of spongy [lit. like an udder] and cruddy flesh, white, pliant, and not at all fixed and hard, and that is for the keeping and saving of heat and for the changing of blood into whiteness. And it is by strong heat in their substance that seethes the blood and turns it and makes it white.)

Cruddy would continue to be associated with bodily fluids. In Book 1 of his 1590 Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser uses the adjective to describe coagulated blood:

So well they sped, that they be come at length
Vnto the place, whereas the Paynim lay,
Deuoid of outward sence, and natiue strength,
Couerd with charmed cloud from vew of day
And sight of men, since his late luckelesse fray.
His cruell wounds with cruddy bloud congeald
They binden vp so wisely, as they may,
And handle softly, till they can be healed:
So lay him in her charet close in night concealed.

Our current sense of cruddy meaning something filthy or unpleasant appears in American slang in the late nineteenth century. We see it in Allan Pinkerton’s 1877 The Molly Maguires and the Detectives in an attempt to replicate the speech of an Irish-American. Here Pinkerton uses it to mean filthy:

“Tell me, thrue and honest now,” said McKenna, “how this thing happened. It is plain enough that it wor your own hand that did it.”

“Why the d—1 do you say that?”

“Sure an’ you needn’t take me for a gomersal, cruddy from the bogs! I kin see, wid half an eye, that nobody could iver shoot ye like this, exceptin’ Mike Lawler himself!”

And in this passage, he uses it to describe a person:

Mike, meanwhile, took occasion once more to caution the operative against saying anything about their talk of the forenoon. He was reassured when McParlan suggested that he was no cruddy idiot, and reiterated his promise to observe great care over his lips. “Trust me to know better than to blather over what is tould me in confidence!” were his concluding words.

Crud, referring to an unspecified illness, is first seen in college slang in 1930s. The journal American Speech records it being in use on the Stanford University campus in California in 1932:

Crud means illness. “I’ve got the crud, means “I’m ill.”

This illness sense of crud would become widespread in the American military during the Second World War.

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Sources:

Bartholomæus Anglicus. On the Properties of Things (De proprietatibus rerum), vol 1 of 3. John Trevisa, trans. M. C. Seymour, ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975, 5.48, 261.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. crud, n. cruddy, adj.

J. D. “Jottings.” American Speech, 7.3 (February 1932), 232. JSTOR.

Langland, William. Piers Plowman (C-text). Derek Pearsall, ed. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2008, lines 8.300–205, 167–68.

Middle English Dictionary, 13 January 2025, s.v crud, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2019, s.v. curd, n.

Pinkerton, Allan. The Molly Maguires and the Detectives. Allan Pinkerton’s Detective Stories 6. New York: G. W. Carleton, 1877, 157 & 385. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“Receipts in Ancient Cookery” (c. 1425). In A Collection of Ordinances and Regulations for the Government of the Royal Household, Made in Divers Reigns. London: John Nichols for the Society of Antiquaries, 1790, 463. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century Collections Online. London, British Library, MS Arundel 334.

Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Qveene, London: William Ponsonbie, 1590, 1.5.29, 68. Project Gutenberg.

Image credit: Songs for the Nursery. Londong: Darton & Co., 1856(?), 8/2. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century Collections Online. Public domain image.