Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A dog considered to be inferior or undesirable; a mongrel.
  • noun A base or cowardly person.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A dog: usually in depreciation, a snarling, worthless, or outcast dog; a dog of low or degenerate breed.
  • noun Figuratively, a surly, ill-bred man; a low, despicable, ill-natured fellow: used in contempt.
  • noun An abbreviation of currency
  • noun of current.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun A mongrel or inferior dog.
  • noun A worthless, snarling fellow; -- used in contempt.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun archaic A mongrel or inferior dog.
  • noun archaic A detestable person.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun an inferior dog or one of mixed breed
  • noun a cowardly and despicable person

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English curre, perhaps of Scandinavian origin; see gerə- in Indo-European roots.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Middle English curre (compare Middle Dutch corre ("house dog")), shortened from Middle English curdogge or kurdogge, a compound whose second element is clearly dogge ("dog"). The first element is probably from Old Norse kurra ("to growl, grumble") and related to Middle Low German korren ("to growl").

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Examples

  • _gradle_complete () local cur tasks COMPREPLY = () cur = $ {COMP_WORDS [COMP_CWORD]} tasks = 'clean compile dists javadoc jar test war' cur = ` echo $cur | sed 's/\\\\

    Dashboard RSS Feed Jesse Eichar 2010

  • _gradle_complete () local cur tasks COMPREPLY = () cur = $ {COMP_WORDS [COMP_CWORD]} tasks = 'clean compile dists javadoc jar test war' cur = ` echo $cur | sed 's/\\\\

    Dashboard RSS Feed 2009

  • _gradle_complete () local cur tasks COMPREPLY = () cur = $ {COMP_WORDS [COMP_CWORD]} tasks = 'clean compile dists javadoc jar test war' cur = ` echo $cur | sed 's/\\\\

    Dashboard RSS Feed Shaun Mangelsdorf 2009

  • The next instant the latter kicked me, violently, as a cur is kicked.

    Chapter 5 2010

  • The next instant the latter kicked me, violently, as a cur is kicked.

    Chapter 5 1904

  • But the position of debtor to a titled cur brings a worse for endurance.

    Complete Project Gutenberg Works of George Meredith George Meredith 1868

  • But the position of debtor to a titled cur brings a worse for endurance.

    The Amazing Marriage — Complete George Meredith 1868

  • But the position of debtor to a titled cur brings a worse for endurance.

    The Amazing Marriage — Volume 5 George Meredith 1868

  • "Well, all through your nasty cur, which is the same thing."

    Snarley-yow or The Dog Fiend Frederick Marryat 1820

  • Figuratively speaking, the cur is a cross between a

    Salem-News.com 2010

Comments

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  • Excerpt from "The Best of Myles" wherein he holds forth on the Irish language:

    While the average English speaker gets along with a mere 400 words, the Irish-speaking peasant uses 4,000. Considering what most English speakers can achieve with their tiny fund of noises, it is a nice speculation to what extremity one would be reduced if one were locked up all day with an Irish-speaking bore...

    .... The 400/4000 ratio is fallacious; 400/400,000 would be more like it. There is scarcely a single word in the Irish language ... that is simple and explicit. Apart from words with endless shades of cognate meaning, there are many with so complete a spectrum of graduated ambiguity that each of them can be made to express two directly contrary meetings, as well as a plethora of intermediate concepts.... Superimpose on all that the miasma of ironic usage, poetic licence, oxymoron, Celtic evasion, Irish bullery and Paddywhackery and it is a safe bet you will find yourself very far from home. Here is an example copied from Dinneen and from more authentic sources known only to my little self:

    Cur, g. curtha and cuirthe, m. - act of putting, sending, sowing, raining discussing, burying, vomiting, hammering into the ground, throwing through the air, rejecting, shooting, the setting or clamp in a rick of turf, selling,addressing, the crown of cast iron buttons which have been made bright by contact with cliff faces, the stench of congealing badgers suet, the luminence of glue-lice, a noise made in a house by an unauthorised person, a heron's boil, a leprachauns denture, a sheep biscuit, the act of inflating hare's offal with a bicycle pump, a leak in a spirit level, the whine of a sewage farm windmill, a corncrakes clapper, the scum on the eye of a senile ram, a dustmans dumpling, a beetles faggot, the act of loading ever rift with ore, a dumb man's curse, a blasket, a 'kur', a fiddlers occupational disease, a fairy godmothers father, a hawks vertigo, the art of predicting past events, a wooden coat, a custard-mincer, a blue-bottles 'farm', a gravy flask, a timber-mine, a toy craw, a porridge mill, a fair day donnybrook with nothing barred, a stoats stomach-pump, a broken-

    But what is the use? One could go on and on without reaching anywhere in particular.

    Your paltry English speaker apprehends sea-going craft through the infantile cognition which merely distinguishes the small from the big. If it's small, it's a boat, and if it's big it's a ship. In his great book

    i An tOileanach (The Islander)

    the uneducated Tomas O Criomhthain uses, perhaps, a dozen words to convey the concept of varying super-marinity:

    i arthrach long, soitheach, bad, naomhog, bad raice, galbhad, pucan

    and whatever you are having yourself.

    The plight of the English speaker with his wretched box of 400 vocal beads may be imagined when i say that a really good Irish speaker would blurt out the whole 400 in one cosmic grunt. In Donegal there are native speakers who know so many million words that it is a matter of pride with them never to use the same word twice in a lifetime. Their life (not to say their language) becomes very complex at the century mark; but there you are.

    October 15, 2007

  • Woah! I read that in 'The Best of Myles' just the other day!

    November 24, 2007

  • Australia was scandalised when, on 11-11-1975, then Prime Minister Gough Whitlam was effectively dismissed by the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr. Wot, the PM sacked? How could it be? Whitlam knew that Opposition leader Fraser had been plotting against him. But he was livid when he found out the lengths that his nemesis had gone to. A very terse official read a statement from the G-G to the effect that both houses of parliament had been dissolved and Fraser was caretaker PM until an election could be held. Whitlam, a very ponderous but theatrical character, took up a position on the steps of Parliament House and addressed the media.

    Whitlam: "The proclamation you have just heard read by the Governor-General's official secretary was countersigned ... Malcolm Fraser ... who will go down in Australian history, from Remembrance Day 1975 onwards, as Kerr's cur."

    I don't think the meaning he had in mind was leprechaun's denture or stoat's stomach-pump, but the temptation to give such a reading is building!

    November 24, 2007

  • According to Orson Scott Card (by way of Guybrush Threepwood), this is the end of the road, and you are a gutter-crawling cur.

    November 25, 2007