Etymology

con crud

Today it means: An illness resulting from having people from a wide variety of places at a single gathering such as a convention, allowing disease to spread easily among them due to lack of immunity. Full definition →

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The story

From con + crud (“disease”). The former part a shortening of conference or convention. The latter part meaning any disease, from earlier army and student slang for venereal disease (“sexually transmitted disease”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.