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Crambo is a rhyming game which, according to Joseph Strutt,Joseph Strutt, William Hone The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England, published by Forgotten Books, 1830, Page 450 was played as early as the 14th century under the name of the ABC of Aristotle. It is also known as capping the rhyme. The name may also be used to describe a doggerel poem which exhausts the possible rhymes with a particular word.
In the days of the Stuarts it was very popular, and is frequently mentioned in the writings of the time. Thus William Congreve's 1695 play Love for Love, i. 1, contains the passage,
"Get the Maids to Crambo in an Evening, and learn the knack of Rhyming."
Crambo in the nineteenth century became a word game in which one player would think of a word and tell the others what it rhymes with. The others do not name the actual word they guess, but describe its meaning. Thus one might say, "I know a word that rhymes with bird." A second asks, "Is it ridiculous?" "No, it is not absurd." "Is it a group of cows?" "No, it is not a herd." This proceeds until the right word is guessed.
One of Crambo's more famous devotees, Robert Burns (1759–1796), wrote: "Amaist as soon as I could spell, / I to the crambo-jingle fell."
James Boswell (1740–1795) was famous for his skill at the game. One crambo poem from Boswell is rhymed around "the Laird of Craigubble", a fellow Crambo player. One of the stanzas goes:
"To render you bright with choice liquor at night / Take Punch made of rum that is double / And I give you this charge be your Bowl full & large / To content the good Laird of Craigubble."Each stanza in the poem has the rhyme scheme ABCB, and every stanza ends with "the Laird of Craigubble".Jennifer L. Holley on Crambo, in Yale Findings Yale Alumni Magazine November/December 2004
Karl Marx (1818–1883) was a frequent dumb crambo player with his wife and daughters in their North London home. Francis Wheen, Karl Marx: A Life, (Fourth Estate, 1999), (New York, New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), Chapter 12, page 371.
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