Cradle may refer to:
Mechanical devices:
- Bassinet, a small bed, often on rockers, in which babies and small children sleep
- Ship cradle, supports a ship that is dry docked
- Cradle (grain), in agriculture is a device based upon a scythe to cleanly reap and harvest grain
- Cradle (mining), used to separate gold from other rocks.
- Newton's cradle, a device that demonstrates conservation of momentum and energy via a series of swinging spheres
Arts and literature:
- Cradle (band), a popular Malay rock band from Singapore that was formed in 1995 by four well-known musicians in the music industry at that time
- Cradle (novel), a novel by Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee
- Cradle (song), a single released by British girl group Atomic Kitten
- The Cradle, a 2007 horror film starring Lukas Haas and Emily Hampshire
- Cradle of filth, an Extreme metal band from Suffolk, England
- Cradle (circus act), an aerial circus act
- Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, a recycling and industrial management book
- The Pleasure Seekers/Cradle#Cradle, a band that Suzi Quatro played in (in the late 1960s and early 1970s) before she became famous
As a metaphor for humanity's origins:
- Cradle of Humankind, a World Heritage Site near Johannesburg in South Africa, where many early hominid remains were discovered
- Cradle of civilization, any of the various regions regarded as the earliest centers of civilization
- Cradle of Liberty (disambiguation)
Other:
- Cradle (circus act) (also known as aerial cradle or casting cradle), a type of aerial circus act
- Cradle (wrestling), a very basic move in amateur wrestling
- Cradle to Cradle, a biomimetic approach to the design of systems
Famous quotes containing the word cradle:
“When cradle and spool are past
And I mere shade at last
Coagulate of stuff
Transparent like the wind,
I think that I may find
A faithful love, a faithful love.”
—William Butler Yeats (18651939)
“To look almost pretty, is an acquisition of higher delight to a girl who has been looking plain the first fifteen years of her life, than a beauty from her cradle can ever receive.”
—Jane Austen (17751817)
“Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,
Out of the mocking-birds throat, the musical shuttle,
Out of the Ninth-month midnight,
Over the sterile sands and the fields beyond, where the child
leaving his bed wandered alone, bareheaded, barefoot”
—Walt Whitman (18191892)