Meaning
To fall heavily, especially from a horse, bicycle or motorbike, or by extension to fail badly at a venture. The literal falling sense survives in reports of riding and cycling accidents, while the figurative sense covers everything from business plans to election campaigns. Informal British usage; wry rather than sympathetic, in both the falling and the failing senses. Regional use: British English.
Origin
Cropper here means a heavy headlong fall, probably a noun drawn from 'neck and crop', an older phrase for tumbling headlong that itself grew out of the 16th-century 'neck and heels'. The earliest known 'neck and crop' is in Edward Nairne's Poems (1791), describing a startled horse whose rider 'tumbled, neck and crop'. As a noun for the fall itself, 'cropper' appears on 26 December 1847 in Bell's Life in London, when the steeplechaser Artist 'fell a cropper'; Robert Surtees's Ask Mamma (1858) has a rider who 'got a cropper for his pains', and the exact form 'came a cropper' is recorded in the same paper in March 1861. The broadened sense of failing badly was recorded almost immediately, in John Camden Hotten's Dictionary of Modern Slang (1859). A persistent folk story credits Henry Smith Cropper, a Nottingham sheriff whose firm sold Minerva printing presses, with printers catching their fingers and so 'coming a cropper'; The Phrase Finder states there is no truth in this and calls it just another invention, and Word Histories, which surveys the early record, offers it no support.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- came a cropper
- come a real cropper
- coming a cropper
- get a cropper
Usage Examples
- Her mount refused the third fence and she came a cropper right in front of the judges' box.
- The chancellor came a cropper over the growth forecast, forced to withdraw a budget measure within a week.
- After coming a cropper on the wet tram lines, he traded the motorbike for a season ticket.