1680 J. Phillips Dr. Oates's Narr. Vindicated vii. 33 See how cursedly this great Atlas of the Catholick cause crickles at the hamms.

1864 R. D. Blackmore Clara Vaughan I. i. xv. 124 The vace of e a hurning laike a taypot, and never a drop of out to aise the crickles of your barck.

1914 Yale Sheffield Monthly Feb. 206 Life always becomes dog-eared sooner than its shelf-mates and the Atlantic Monthly is sure to proclaim its dormancy with a crickle of newness to the isolated soul who runs its pages.

1955 E. Farjeon Little Bookroom 271 All night long the pungent smell or the Christmas tree was in her nostrils, and the tiny crickle of its dropping needles in her ears.

2001 Countryside & Small Stock Jrnl. (Nexis) July 95 Now, each little crackle and crickle that pops, as the house settles into a new comfort zone, causes me to perk up senses, listening to see if another one [sc.an earthquake] is on the way.

1849 H. A. Wise Los Gringos xxxix. 335 We..planted our feet on the crunched, crowded and broken slabs of lava, with the ashes crickling beneath the tread, very like crisp snow.

1883 J. S. Stallybrass tr. J. Grimm Teutonic Mythol. III. 929 You hear him [sc. the wild hunter] bluster in the air, so that it ‘crickles and crackles’.

1922 J. Sillars McBrides ii. 19 Scratching his neck till I could hear the hairs of his whiskers crickle and snap like breaking twigs.

1997 S. Lindsay Primate Behavior 65 Dido, rumbling, summons the beetles, and they come, crickling through the trampled grass, tilting over popcorn topography.