Does the word "crap" come from famous British plumber Thomas Crapper's name?

bloomsby

No. "Despite folk etymology insistence, not from Thomas Crapper (1837-1910) who was, however, a busy plumber and may have had some minor role in the development of modern toilets. The name Crapper is a northern form of Cropper (attested from 1221), an occupational surname, obviously, but the exact reference is unclear". Source: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=crap&searchmode=none Aug 23 09, 9:01 PM

star_gazer

crap "defecate" 1846 (v.), 1898 (n.), from one of a cluster of words generally applied to things cast off or discarded (e.g. "weeds growing among corn" (1425), "residue from renderings" (1490s), 18c. underworld slang for "money," and in Shropshire, "dregs of beer or ale"), all probably from M.E. crappe "grain that was trodden underfoot in a barn, chaff" (c.1440), from M.Fr. crape "siftings," from O.Fr. crappe, from M.L. crappa, crapinum "chaff." Sense of "rubbish, nonsense" also first recorded 1898. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/crap Aug 23 09, 9:25 PM

zbeckabee

The origin of crap is still being debated. Possible sources include the Dutch Krappe; Low German krape meaning a vile and inedible fish; Middle English crappy, and Thomas Crapper. Where crap is derived from Crapper, it is by a process know as, pardon the pun, a back formation. http://www.theplumber.com/crapper.html Another source states: Crap is actually Middle English. It seems to be a mixture of two older words — one thread comes from Dutch krappen, to pluck off, cut off, or separate; the other may be from Old French crappe, siftings or waste or rejected matter, from medieval Latin crappa, chaff. The first sense in English was indeed “chaff”, and was also used in some places as the name for weeds that infested cereal crops, such as darnel, rye-grass, or charlock. Later (we’re talking about the end of the fifteenth century here) it took on an extra meaning of the waste residue that was left after rendering fat. Its application to excretion appeared in the 1840s. There’s an example in the Oxford English Dictionary from 1846 that refers to a crapping ken, a privy, where ken means a house. This seems to be where the sense came from, but it doesn’t derive directly from the word crap already mentioned. Older examples show that this term for a privy was originally croppin ken. Its source may be a dialect English word meaning a tail, which developed in sense from the obvious anal associations. What seems to have happened is that croppin ken changed to crapping ken around the middle of the nineteenth century under the influence of the idea of crap as smelly rubbish, and crap, noun and verb, later came from crapping by a process called back-formation. Crapper is American slang, which dates from the 1920s, and is an obvious enough extension of the older noun and verb. The common story that American servicemen stationed in London in the First World War saw Mr Crapper’s name on sanitary ware and borrowed it is unsupported by any facts, though it doesn’t seem altogether implausible. As Thomas Crapper didn’t start his business until 1861, and didn’t become well known until much later, it’s clear his name had no influence on the development of the word crap. http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-cra1.htm Aug 23 09, 10:10 PM