Green’s Dictionary of Slang

1. a feast.

1833		Satirist (London) 10 Feb. 470/3: essex conservative cram. Last week the committee of Mr. Hall Dare, the Conservative Member for the southern division of Essex, got up an aristocratic gorge at the Angel Inn, Ilford [...] The tickets for the ‘tuck out’ were one guinea.
1833		Satirist (London) 2 June 5/1: Lord Fivebottles was taken suddenly indisposed (a small fit of apoplexy) at the Earl of Stuffington’s cram.

2. (UK/US campus) a paper on which material necessary to be learned for a given examination or test is written down.

1845		J. Pycroft Collegian’s Guide 223: Take care what you light your cigars with [...] you’ll be burning some of Tufton’s crams.
1854		‘Cuthbert Bede’ Adventures of Mr Verdant Green (1982) II 238: Getting up his subjects by the aid of those royal roads to knowledge, variously known as cribs, crams, plugs, abstracts, analyses, or epitomes.
1856		B.H. Hall College Words (rev. edn) 142: A paper on which is written something necessary to be learned, previous to an examination.

3. (orig. Oxon. university) a tutor.

1861		D. Cook Paul Foster’s Daughter I 195: I shall go to a coach, a cram, a grindstone [...] who’ll stick it all well into me.
1899		Kipling ‘A Little Prep’ in Complete Stalky & Co. (1987) 186: King’s the best classical cram we’ve got.

4. a lie.

1831		Satirist (London) 24 Ap. 21/3: ‘It’s a damn’d cram’.
1842		Punch II 21/2: It soundeth somewhat like a cram: but our honour is at stake, and we repeat the ‘mile’.
1862		F.W. Farrar St Winifred’s (1863) 306: By some delicate distinction the falsehood presented itself under the guise of ‘a cram,’ and not of a naked lie.
1871		Hamilton Spectator (Vic.) 7 Jan. 1/7: [A]ll opinions not agreeing with their own are likely to be ‘cram,’ ‘gas,’ ‘rot’ or ‘rubbish’.
1880		Bulletin (Sydney) 8 May 4/4: The Daily Tell-a-cram, in reporting the death of a man in the Ifirmary, says [etc].
1881-2		T.B. Reed Fifth Form at St Dominic’s (1890) 149: ‘We licked the old Tadpoles in the match. (‘No you didn’t!’ ‘That’s a cram!’).
1891		T.B. Reed Cock House Fellsgarth 41: ‘You’re telling crams; that’s not why you brought us here’.
1894		Truth (Sydney) 11 Feb. 7/2: So I put him down a whaler, rather prone to telling crams.
1900		Boy’s Own Paper 24 Nov. 115: What did that wretched young ‘Parsnips’ [...] do but go and sneak to Sarsons, and say that Cobb Major and I had done it, which was a regular cram.
1905		Sporting Times 4 Mar. 1/2: All the neighbourhood swears that the story’s no cram.
1922		Joyce Ulysses 405: Tell a cram, that.

5. (UK/US campus) last-minute work for a specific test or examination; thus cram-book, a book used for intensive learning; cram-paper, a prepared list of examination answers, to be learned parrot-fashion; cram-shop, a school run by a crammer n. (1)

1845		J. Pycroft Collegian’s Guide 240: I have made him promise to give me four or five evenings of about half an hour’s cram each.
c.1847		Taylor & Vansittart ‘The Two Voices’ in Whibley In Cap and Gown (1889) 235: Thy senses thou dost oversteep / In cram, nor any limit keep; / Thou canst not read, but thou must sleep!
1861		T. Hughes Tom Brown at Oxford (1880) 107: If his capacity for taking in cram would do it, he would be all right.
1867		Freeman’s Jrnl (Sydney) 21 Dec. 7/2: [E]xaminations may be constructed and answered so as to draw forth a [...] considerable mass of cram and very little real evidence of sound attainment.
1872		Morning Post 15 Oct. n.p.: The head boy [...] had by cram been enabled to answer any given set of questions, and to work any papers at an ‘exam’ [F&H].
1875		‘Aliph Cheem’ Lays of Ind (1905) 37: Thus five months passed. Oh, dear ! those most exhausting months of cram!
1888		‘’Arry on Competitive Examination’ in Punch 1 Dec. 253/2: Though I did do a bit of a cram, / I was bunnicked slap out of the ’unt all along of a bloomin’ Exam.
1894		Truth (Sydney) 28 Feb. 4/2: Those who fag their way by a fastidious service in the College of Cram.
1895		J.S. Wood Yale Yarns 1: Even the ‘greasy grinds’ hardly felt it in their hearts to begin the evening’s cram.
1899		Kipling ‘The Moral Reformers’ in Complete Stalky & Co. (1987) 125: Sent to school in despair by parents who hoped that six months’ steady cram might, perhaps, jockey them into Sandhurst.
1905		H.G. Wells Kipps (1952) 20: There was something [...] about ‘examination success’ — though Woodrow, of course, disapproved of ‘cram’.