scrape
Definitions
General English
Food
- verb to remove only the outermost layer of the skin of a vegetable or fruit by scraping it with a knife
Medical
- verb to remove the surface of something by moving a sharp knife across it
Military
- noun a shallow pit dug to provide a hull-down position for an armoured fighting vehicle
Origin & History of “scrape”
Scrape is certainly of Germanic origin, but it is not clear whether it was borrowed from Old Norse skrapa (ancestor of Swedish skrapa and Danish skrabe) or middle Dutch schrapen. either way it goes back to a prehistoric Germanic base *skrap-, source also of Old English scrapian ‘scratch’, which survived into the 16th century as shrape. Scrap ‘small piece’ (14th c.) was borrowed from Old Norse skrap ‘remnants, trifles’, a derivative of the same base as skrapa; and scrap ‘fight’ (17th c.) may have originated as a variant of scrap.
