Bop

How to spell bop

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce bop

What does bop mean?

1. verbTo strike someone or something gently or playfully.
2. nounAn informal term for a lively, enjoyable, upbeat song.
3. verbTo dance happily and casually to upbeat music.

Bop in a sentence

• verb

  The toddler tried to bop the balloon back into the air.

• noun

  Every track on the new album is a genuine bop.

• verb

  She likes to bop around the kitchen while making breakfast.

• verb

  She would gently bop the cat on the nose when it chewed the wires.

• noun

  The radio finally played a bop that got everyone in the office dancing.

• verb

  The kids began to bop along to the cartoon theme.

Where does bop come from?

Language of origin: Other

Bop is a twentieth-century word with two strands feeding into it, and both are essentially imitative, meaning they were coined to echo a sound. The sense 'to hit lightly' arose in American slang around the 1930s as an echoic word for a quick, soft blow, sitting alongside relatives like 'bonk' and 'bash'. The musical sense came slightly later as a clipped form of 'bebop', a style of fast, improvised jazz whose own name imitated the sound of two quick sung notes. From the music, 'bop' broadened to mean a lively dance or a catchy upbeat song, and informally 'to bop' came to mean to dance happily to that kind of music. Because the word is so short and spelled exactly as it sounds, it carries no real spelling trap; the only thing to remember is the single 'p'.

How the word is built

• bop (single imitative root; no prefix or suffix)