And no, the crap portion of this word was not a judgmental adjective - it was referring to the game of craps, a gambling game in which a pair of dice are thrown (or shot).īy the middle of the 20th century the shooting of craps was being used, in one way or another, to indicate unpredictability in some venture: an article on boiler rooms in the Chicago Daily Tribune in 1956 says “The aim has been to distinguish between sound investment objectives and income and ‘the old crap shooting game of speculation.’” Definition: something (such as a business venture) that has an unpredictable outcomeĬrapshoot is typically encountered today written as a closed compound (single word), but when it first entered the language in the late 19th century it was generally an open compound (“crap shoot”).
