Origin of the word "crap"
It has often been claimed in popular culture that the slang term for human
bodily waste,
crap, originated with Thomas Crapper because of his association with lavatories. A common version of this story is that
American servicemen stationed in England during
World War I saw his name on cisterns and used it as army slang, i.e. "I'm going to the crapper".
[12]
The word
crap is actually of
Middle English origin and predates its application to bodily waste. Its most likely etymological origin is a combination of two older words: the
Dutch krappen (to pluck off, cut off, or separate) and the
Old French crappe (siftings, waste or rejected matter, from the
medieval Latin crappa).
[12] In English, it was used to refer to chaff and also to weeds or other rubbish. Its first recorded application to bodily waste, according to the
Oxford English Dictionary, appeared in 1846, 10 years after Crapper was born, under a reference to a
crapping ken, or a privy, where
ken means a house.