scram
A gun, firearmA gun, firearm.
» Scram, you cats!
FeuDRenais2 · Tatoeba · CC BY 2.0 FRMeaning
5 senses(Multicultural London English, slang)A gun, firearm.
(also, attributive)A shutdown of a nuclear reactor (or, by extension, some other thing), often done rapidly due to an emergency.
The device used to shut down a nuclear reactor; also, the button or switch used to initiate a shutdown.
(Derbyshire, Wales)A scratch, especially caused by claws or fingernails.
(US, archaic)A mine previously worked on where most of the ore is believed to have been removed, but which is still being mined on a small scale.
Examples
2 sentencesScram, you cats!
Scram. I'm busy.
Origin
Probably either: Uncertain; the verb is possibly derived from etymology 1. It has been suProbably either:
Uncertain; the verb is possibly derived from etymology 1. It has been suggested that the word is an acronym for phrases like “safety control rod actuator mechanism”, “safety cut rope axe man”, “safety control rod axe man”, and “safety control rods activation mechanism”, but these are most likely backronyms.
The verb is a variant of dialectal English scramb (“to pull or rake together with the hands; to gather a handful of something from the ground; to scratch with the claws or nails; to pull down violently; to tear off; to maul about; a handful of something from the ground”), possibly related to Dutch schrammen (“to graze, scratch”) and German schrammen (“to scratch, scrape”); see etymology 1.
Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0 · source
Forms
plural: scramsWord family
1 related wordsSee also
neighbours in the dictionaryDictionary text adapted from Wiktionary (Wiktionary contributors, CC BY-SA 4.0) and Open English WordNet / Princeton WordNet (CC BY 4.0, WordNet License); shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. Example sentences and recordings are credited where they appear.