Flop

How to spell flop

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce flop

What does flop mean?

1. verbTo fall, drop, or sit down heavily and loosely, often from exhaustion.
2. nounA complete failure, especially a film, show, or product that does badly.

Flop in a sentence

• verb

  After the long shift she would just flop onto the sofa.

• noun

  The expensive launch turned out to be a costly flop.

• verb

  The tired dog would flop in the shade whenever it got too hot.

• noun

  Critics agreed the sequel was a box office flop.

Where does flop come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Flop first appears in English in the seventeenth century as a variant of the older word flap, with the vowel changed to suggest a duller, heavier sound. Both words are imitative in origin, meaning they were coined to echo the noise of something striking a surface; where flap captures a light slapping movement, flop suggests a heavier, limp collapse. From the literal sense of falling or dropping clumsily, the word picked up a figurative meaning in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: a project, show, or product that fails completely, as if it had collapsed flat. The same imitative family gives us flip and flap, and the rhyming trio is often used together to describe loose, uncontrolled motion. Because the word is short and sound-based rather than borrowed from Latin or Greek, its spelling is refreshingly regular and matches its pronunciation almost exactly.

How the word is built

• flop (a single imitative root; no prefix or suffix), a variant of flap