Chips

How to spell chips

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce chips

What does chips mean?

1. nounStrips of potato deep-fried until soft inside and crisp outside, a staple of British takeaways.
2. nounThin slices of potato fried or baked until crunchy and sold in bags as a snack.
3. nounTiny slivers of semiconductor material that form the integrated circuits inside electronic devices.
4. nounSmall flat discs used to represent money in casino and card games.
5. nounSmall pieces broken or cut off a larger object.

Chips in a sentence

• He ordered fish and chips from the shop on the corner.

• He tore open a bag of salted chips during the film.

• The factory makes the silicon chips that power modern laptops.

• She stacked her chips neatly before placing the next bet.

• Wood chips from the saw covered the workshop floor.

• The pub serves a generous portion of chips with every burger.

Where does chips come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the plural of 'chip', which traces back to Old English 'cippian', a verb meaning 'to cut' or 'to pare away', and is part of the same Germanic family that gave English 'chop'. The earliest noun sense was simply a small fragment of wood or stone that had been cut or knocked off a larger block, and that literal meaning still survives in 'wood chips' and 'a chip off the old block'. From there the word fanned out in every direction: thin slices of fried potato took the name in the nineteenth century, gambling counters borrowed it because they too are small flat discs, and in the twentieth century engineers applied it to the tiny slivers of silicon at the heart of a computer. Because the word is short, native, and entirely phonetic, its spelling has stayed stable and uncomplicated for centuries.

How the word is built

• chip (a small broken-off piece)
• -s (plural marker)