cran

This entry needs pronunciation information. If you are familiar with the IPA or enPR then please add some!

This entry needs an audio pronunciation. If you are a native speaker with a microphone, please record this word. The recorded pronunciation will appear here when it's ready.

Evidently from, or at least influenced by Goidelic; compare Scottish Gaelic crann (“lot, measure of herring, tree, etc.”).

cran (plural crans or cran)

(obsolete) A measure of herrings, either imprecise or sometimes legally specified. It has oftentimes been about 37½ imperial gallons, or ~750 herrings on average (up to 1200 or even ~2500).
- 1800 Dec, Sir Richard Phillips, The Monthly magazine‎, volume 10, number 66, page 486:
  Very flattering indeed has been the success of the fishermen; and many boats have come in loaded, averaging thirty or forty crans each (every cran estimated at 1,000 herrings), and disposed of their cargoes at nine shillings per cran; but the price has been since raised to fifteen shillings.
- 1938, Louis MacNeice, Bagpipe Music:
  His brother caught three hundred cran when the seas were lavish, / Threw the bleeders back in the sea and went upon the parish.
- 1960, Ewan MacColl, BBC radio ballad, Singing the Fishing:
  […] And fish the knolls on the North Sea Holes
  And try your luck at the North Shields Gut
  With a catch of a hundred cran.
- 1970s, Archie Fisher, The Final Trawl:
  But I've fished a lifetime, boy and man,
  And the final trawl scarcely makes a cran.
(obsolete, rare, by extension) A barrel made to hold such a measure.
- For more quotations using this term, see Citations:cran.

(This etymology is missing or incomplete. Please add to it, or discuss it at the Etymology scriptorium.)

cran (plural crans)

(music) An embellishment played on the lowest note of a chanter of a bagpipe, consisting of a series of grace notes produced by rapid sequential lifting of the fingers of the lower hand.

cran (plural crans)

English