[Vocabulary] crib

[Saki6]

http://espn.go.com/espnw/news-comme.../the-legendary-adventures-fearless-girl-gamer
To crib a line from the Notorious B.I.G: Just the way players play, all day every day. I don't know what else to say.

Do you think that "crib" is an archaic word? This dictionary states that the word is old-fashioned.

 

[Rover_KE]

Click here for evidence that 'crib' is alive and well in modern English, and here to consult lots of other dictionaries.

Bookmark both sites for future reference.

 

[Saki6]

Click here for evidence that 'crib' is alive and well in modern English, and here to consult lots of other dictionaries.

Bookmark both sites for future reference.

I've looked at the first site. The percentage numbers are very low. I'm wondering why you could say that the verb "crib," which means "to copy or take someone else's work," is alive and well in modern English.

 

[Rover_KE]

Irrespective of the percentage numbers, the word is virtually as common now as it's ever been since 1800, so I wouldn't say it's archaic — or even old-fashioned.

 

[Skrej]

I've looked at the first site. The percentage numbers are very low.

The thing with those percentages on Ngram is that they're the percentages of usage of a particular word from amongst all the billions (or possibly trillions?) of written English words for a period of 200 years or so, so the percentages are relative.

There are just too many written English words for any word to make up any significant percentage of a corpus of collected written English. Even some of the most-used words in English don't merit very high percentages. Note there are only two words, 'the' and 'and', which even make it above one full percentage point.

The key to the Ngrams isn't as much about the actual percentages, but the percentages in comparison against both other similar words, as well as comparison over time.

Since you're asking about a word being archaic, you'll want to focus on the usage over time. You'll note that although 'crib' goes through periods where its usage declines quite a bit (for some reason it really fell out of favor between 1943 and 1962), overall it continues to steadily rise in usage.