Kraken is a legendary sea monster of enormous size that appears in Scandinavian myth and is usually depicted as a gigantic tentacled creature capable of destroying entire ships and dragging sailors to their doom. The word "kraken" derives from Norwegian "krake," which means "the krake" and is the definite form of "krake," meaning "malformed or overgrown, crooked tree". The kraken was first described by Erik Pontoppidan in 1753, who popularized it to the world and noted that it was multiple-armed according to lore, conjecturing it to be a giant sea-crab, starfish, or a polypus (octopus). However, many of the earliest kraken reports were of creatures so enormous that they grew vegetation on their backs like islands. Nowadays, mythical krakens are thought of as giant squid or octopuses, capable of bringing down a ship with their tentacled arms.