(v. i.) To make a low, hoarse noise in the throat, as a frog, a raven, or a crow; hence, to make any hoarse, dismal sound.
(v. i.) To complain; especially, to grumble; to forebode evil; to utter complaints or forebodings habitually.
(v. t.) To utter in a low, hoarse voice; to announce by croaking; to forebode; as, to croak disaster.
(n.) The coarse, harsh sound uttered by a frog or a raven, or a like sound.
Example Sentences:
(1) The first two experiments imply that stimulation of the skin of the trunk initiates the release croak; Experiments 3 and 4 suggest that an internal afferent source inhibits the release croak and might mediate an important aspect of receptivity in female frogs.
(2) The cathartic moment, in which the king realises he's OK and lovable just as he is, was wonderful for the film-makers to discover, and has been wonderful for worldwide audiences ever since (and the king doesn't die… he merely "croaks").
(3) Poppies in the long grass, frogs croaking for mates, wasps droning lazily at the window, tomatoes and strawberries ripening in garden pots and crickets buzzing at dusk: these are the sights and sounds of an English summer.
(4) We are all getting older thanks to better living conditions, and the French are way older than they have any right to be considering their diet, but the dependable Swedes who have always been goody-goodies are still croaking in their 80s, so most of us will have to settle for that.
(5) And so they hardly ever leave a flat in which, thanks to the croaking boiler, the temperature hovers around 10 degrees.
(6) With drugs, oblivious, in a basement, frozen nobly on a mountain top, screaming in a car crash, or traditionally in a bed surrounded by our family and children, croaking out our last wishes?
(7) "Intelligent tadpoles reconcile themselves to the inconvenience of their position by reflecting that although most of them will live to be tadpoles and nothing more, the most fortunate of the species will one day shed their tails, distend their mouths and stomachs, hop nimbly on to dry land and croak addresses to their former friends on the virtue by which tadpoles of character and capacity can rise to be frogs."
(8) Three decades later, in July 2011, to watch a slightly pasty, croaking, self-styled "humble" Murdoch appear before a televised committee of suddenly irreverent MPs was to see something dragged out into the light: a power relationship that would never be quite the same again.
(9) Talked a lot about Under Milk Wood: how he came to London in 1953, with a fiver in his pocket, and went in search of Dylan Thomas in the Soho and Fitzrovia pubs, only to find that he had just croaked in New York.
(10) But as the fearless Ali strutted on, inventing new ways, new scenes, new angles, new endings, those croaking pronouncements of veterans petered out.
(11) The only MacTaggarts regularly recalled with relish are those in which all-powerful television grandees were venomously slagged off in public - Dennis Potter's attack on the then BBC director general John Birt as a "croak-voiced Dalek" in 1993, and Michael Grade's escalation of his own feud with Birt the previous year.
(12) I learn to distinguish the croaks of the marsh frog from the scratchy cry of the reed warbler and watch brightly coloured damselflies darting about in the bullrushes.
(13) This report investigates the sources of stimuli which initiate and inhibit the release croak of Rana pipiens.
(14) It can be a surprisingly noisy place, what with the barking of the muntjac deer, the croaking of the frogs, the quacking of the widgeons … Look and listen out for Faint lights near the ground, especially in June and July.
(15) Cool off after a hot day on the beach in the natural swimming pond, complete with lily pads and croaking frogs.
(16) At the moment the city also sounds like seagulls croaking at each other from outside my window from about 3am every morning.
(17) Roger no longer expresses a desire to croak it prematurely although he is 69 years old now and back on the road.
(18) Even if it was in a husky croak, and I couldn't manage the chorus.
(19) There was no trace of human life, only the croak of a raven and a trickling stream.
(20) The pectoral fin of the croaking gourami, Trichopsis vittatus, has become modified as a sound-producing organ and retains its original function in locomotion and hovering.