If you crack a joke, you tell a joke, as in ‘He was very relaxed, smiling and cracking jokes’. Sustainable Development and Global CitizenshipĪpart from its usual meanings of ‘to break something so that a line appears on it’, ‘to break something open’ or ‘to hit something hard’, the transitive form of the verb crack can also mean to solve a complicated problem or find the answer to a mystery, as in ‘With the help of DNA, detectives believe they are finally close to cracking a case that has remained unsolved for twenty years’.
