Past tense of crane: stretched your neck to look at something far away or high up.
From Old English 'cran', related to the bird crane, which has a long curved neck. The verb meaning 'to stretch one's neck' comes from the bird's characteristic movement, evolving by the 14th century.
Cranes are so tall and have such distinctively long necks that their name literally became the English verb for stretching your own neck to see better—the bird's body became our verb for looking! It's like how we 'google' things now.
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