Craic ( ) or crack is a term for news, gossip, fun, entertainment, and enjoyable conversation, particularly prominent in Ireland. It is often used with the definite article – the craic – as in the expression "What's the craic?", meaning "How are you?" or "What's happening?". The Scots and English crack was borrowed into Irish as craic in the mid-20th century and the Irish spelling was then reborrowed into English. Under both spellings, the term has become popular and significant in Ireland.
Craic ( ) or crack is a term for news, gossip, fun, entertainment, and enjoyable conversation, particularly prominent in Ireland. It is often used with the definite article – the craic – as in the expression "What's the craic?", meaning "How are you?" or "What's happening?". The Scots and English crack was borrowed into Irish as craic in the mid-20th century and the Irish spelling was then reborrowed into English. Under both spellings, the term has become popular and significant in Ireland.
==History== The word crack is derived from the Middle English crak, meaning "loud conversation, bragging talk". A sense of crack found in Northern England and Scotland meaning "conversation" or "news" produces expressions such as "What's the crack?", meaning "how are you?" or "have you any news?", similar to "what's up?", "how's it going?", or "what's the word?" in other regions. The context involving "news" and "gossip" originated in Northern English and Scots. A book on the speech of Northern England published in 1825 equates crack with "chat, conversation, news". The term is recorded in Scotland with this sense as far back as the 16th century, with both Robert Fergusson and Robert Burns employing it in the 1770s and 1780s.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).