|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
A carabiner or karabiner (colloquially: crab, snap-link, krab, or 'biner) is a metal loop with a sprung or screwed gate. The loop part opposite the gate is referred to as the spine. It can quickly and reversibly connect components in safety-critical systems. The word comes from "Karabinerhaken", meaning "hook for a carbine" in German.
According to Fergus Fleming's book on the beginning of alpinism, Killing Dragons: The conquest of the Alps, the British climbers derided aids like carabiners, ice axes and crampons for some time, leaving their development to Italian, French and other alpinists. Therefore, the term "carabiner" was never properly translated into an English counterpart.
Carabiners are also useful in everyday life, for securing water bottles to belts, or pen knives etc. Cheap and colorful carabiners that vaguely resemble mountaineering carabiners, but are generally thinner, smaller and made of a lower grade metal have become quite popular as keyrings or in other applications as a universal connector. They have an extremely simplified latching mechanism, without a pin to allow the gate to carry a load. Such novelty carabiners are typically marked with an explicit liability warning, e.g. "Not for climbing", as well as a low maximum load, e.g. "Not to exceed 20 lb".