Crambo

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Crambo

Crambo is an old rhyming game

Game

A game is a structured wiktionary:activity, usually undertaken for enjoyment and sometimes used as an educational tool. Games are distinct from Manual labour, which is usually carried out for wiktionary:remuneration, and from art, which is more concerned with the expression of ideas....
which, according to Strutt

Joseph Strutt (engraver and antiquary)

Joseph Strutt was an England engraver and antiquary.Joseph Strutt, engraver, artist, antiquary and author, was born at Chelmsford in 1749. In 1770 he became a student of the Royal Academy, and in the following year secured both the gold and silver medals, the former for oil painting and the latter "for the best Academy figure." He wrote th...
, was played as early as the fourteenth century under the name of the ABC of Aristotle. It is also known as Capping the rhyme. The name may also be used to describe a doggerel

Doggerel

Doggerel is a derogatory term for poetry considered of little literature value. The word probably derives from dog, suggesting either ugliness, or unpalatability ....
poem which exhausts the possible rhymes with a particular word.

In the days of the Stuarts it was very popular, and is frequently mentioned in the writings of the time.

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Encyclopedia

Crambo is an old rhyming game

Game

Joseph Strutt (engraver and antiquary)

Doggerel

"Get the Maids to Crambo in an Evening, and learn the knack of Rhyming."

Etymology

The name comes from the Latin

Latin

Latin is an Italic language, historically spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Through the Military history of the Roman Empire, Latin spread throughout the Mediterranean and a large part of Europe....
crambe and Greek

Greek language

Greek is an Indo-European languages native to the southern Balkan peninsula, the language of the Greek people. It forms an independent branch within Indo-European....
krambe, meaning cabbage (as in crambe repetita, literally meaning re-stewed cabbage). Hence the players started with a rhyme and then "re-stewed" it.

Play

In the early versions of the game up to the eighteenth century, teams would vie with each other to find and express a rhyme for a word or line presented by the opposing player or team. Someone would offer the first rhyme often poking fun at a dignitary, the subsequent lines or couplets would then have to rhyme with this. The verse would be sung to a popular tune of the day and the game collapsed when a player was unable to use his wit to come up with a suitable rhyming word.

Crambo in the nineteenth century became a word game in which one player would think of a word and tell the others what it rhymes with. The others do not name the actual word they guess, but describe its meaning. Thus one might say, "I know a word that rhymes with bird." A second asks, "Is it ridiculous?" "No, it is not absurd." "Is it a part of speech?" "No, it is not a word." This proceeds until the right word is guessed.

In Dumb Crambo the guessers, instead of trying to name the rhyme being given them as a clue, express its meaning by acting the word without speaking in the manner of charades

Charades

Charades or charade is a word game guessing game. In the form most played today, it is an acting game in which one player acts out a word or phrase, often by pantomime similar-sounding words, and the other players guess the word or phrase....
.

Notable players

One of Crambo's more famous devotees, Robert Burns

Robert Burns

Robert Burns was a poet and a lyricist. He is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland, and is celebrated worldwide. He is the best known of the poets who have written in the Scots language, although much of his writing is also in English and a 'light' Scots dialect, accessible to an audience beyond Scotland....
(1759–1796), wrote: "Amaist as soon as I could spell, / I to the crambo-jingle fell."

James Boswell

James Boswell

James Boswell, 9th Laird of Auchinleck was a lawyer, diarist, and author born in Edinburgh, Scotland; he is best known for his biography of Samuel Johnson....
(1740–1795) was famous for his skill at the game. One Crambo poem from Boswell is rhymed around "the Laird of Craigubble," a fellow Crambo player. One of the stanzas goes:

"To render you bright with choice liquor at night / Take Punch made of rum that is double / And I give you this charge be your Bowl full & large / To content the good Laird of Craigubble."

Each stanza in the poem rhymes abcb, and every stanza ends with "the Laird of Craigubble."

Karl Marx

Karl Marx

Karl Heinrich Marx was a Germanphilosophy, political economy, historian, sociologist, humanism, political theorist and revolutionary credited as the founder of communism....
(1818–1883) was a frequent Dumb Crambo player with his wife and daughters in their North London home.