Drip

How to spell drip

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce drip

What does drip mean?

1. verbTo let liquid fall, or to fall itself, in small drops.
2. nounA small falling drop of liquid, or a device that delivers fluid slowly into the body.

Drip in a sentence

• verb

  The tap in the bathroom began to drip overnight.

• noun

  The nurse adjusted the drip feeding fluids into his arm.

• verb

  Rain started to drip from the broken gutter.

• noun

  A steady drip from the ceiling stained the carpet.

Where does drip come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Drip comes from Old English drypan and the related dryppan, meaning 'to let fall in drops', and it belongs to a tight family of native Germanic words that also gave us 'drop' and 'droop'. The sound of the word is itself a clue to its meaning: like 'drip', 'drop' and 'splash', it is largely imitative, echoing the small noise of falling liquid. Through Middle English the spelling settled on the short, blunt form we use today, with a single vowel and a single 'p'. The medical sense, an apparatus that feeds fluid slowly into the body, arrived in the twentieth century, and the slang sense for a dull, feeble person dates from the early 1900s. Because the word is so short and phonetically regular, the spelling has stayed remarkably stable for over a thousand years.

How the word is built

• drip (single root, no affixes; an imitative/echoic English verb)