Chap

How to spell chap

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce chap

What does chap mean?

1. nounAn informal term for a man, especially in British English.
2. verbTo make or become sore, rough, and cracked, as skin does in cold or dry weather.

Chap in a sentence

• noun

  The chap at the front desk signed for the parcel.

• verb

  Cold winter wind can chap your lips within minutes.

• noun

  A friendly chap in the corner shop kept my newspaper aside.

• verb

  Harsh soap tends to chap the hands of anyone washing dishes all day.

Where does chap come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This little word actually carries two separate histories. The familiar British sense of 'chap' meaning a man or fellow is a shortening of 'chapman', an old word for a trader or pedlar, which descends from the Old English ceapman, built on ceap meaning 'trade, bargain, or price'. That same ceap root survives in the place name Cheapside and in the word 'cheap', so a chap was once literally a buyer and seller before the word relaxed into a friendly term for any ordinary man during the 1500s and 1600s. The quite different sense, to chap, meaning skin that splits and roughens in cold weather, is of less certain origin and appears in Middle English as chappen, probably related to words meaning 'to crack or chop'. Despite the short, plain spelling, the two strands stayed unrelated, and only context tells them apart. Confidence in the 'fellow' history is high, while the skin-cracking sense is genuinely uncertain.

How the word is built

• chap (single root; the 'fellow' sense is a shortening of chapman: trader)