cracker

Meaning

Noun

• A dry, thin, crispy baked bread (usually salty or savoury, but sometimes sweet, as in the case of graham crackers and animal crackers).
• A short piece of twisted string tied to the end of a whip that creates the distinctive sound when the whip is thrown or cracked.
• A firecracker.
• A person or thing that cracks, or that cracks a thing (e.g. whip cracker; nutcracker).
• A Christmas cracker.
• Refinery equipment used to pyrolyse organic feedstocks. If catalyst is used to aid pyrolysis it is informally called a cat-cracker
• A fine thing or person (crackerjack).
• An ambitious or hard-working person (i.e. someone who arises at the 'crack' of dawn).
• One who cracks (i.e. overcomes) computer software or security restrictions.
• A noisy boaster; a swaggering fellow.
• An impoverished white person from the southeastern United States, originally associated with Georgia and parts of Florida; any white person.
• A police officer.
• A northern pintail, species of dabbling duck.
• A pair of fluted rolls for grinding caoutchouc.

Origin

• crack + -er. From crack.
• Hard “bread/biscuit” sense first attested in 1739, though “hard wafer” sense attested since 1440.
• Computing senses of cracker, crack, and cracking were promoted in the 1980s as an alternative to hacker, by programmers concerned about negative public associations of hack, hacking. See Citations:cracker.
• Various theories exist regarding the term's application to poor white Southerners. One theory holds that it originated with disadvantaged corn and wheat farmers (corn-cracker), who cracked their crops rather than taking them to the mill. Another theory asserts that it was applied due to Georgia and Florida settlers (Florida crackers) who cracked loud whips to drive herds of cattle, or, alternatively, from the whip cracking of plantation slave drivers. Yet another theory maintains that the term cracker was in use in Elizabethan times to describe braggarts (see crack); a letter from 1766 supports this theory.