Floppy

How to spell floppy

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce floppy

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does floppy mean?

1. adjectiveSoft and flexible so that it hangs or bends loosely rather than holding a firm shape.
2. nounAn informal name for a floppy disk, a thin removable magnetic storage medium once common in personal computers.

Floppy in a sentence

• adjective

  The puppy had long, floppy ears that flapped as it ran.

• noun

  He found an old floppy at the back of the drawer and no machine to read it.

• adjective

  She wore a wide, floppy sun hat on the beach.

• noun

  The report had to be saved onto a single floppy before the meeting.

Where does floppy come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Floppy grew out of the verb 'flop', which appeared in English around the 1600s as a variant of 'flap', imitating the dull sound and loose movement of something falling or hanging slackly. The 'flap'/'flop' pairing belongs to a family of native English words that mimic sounds and motions, so its roots are Germanic and onomatopoeic rather than borrowed from any classical tongue. By the early 1800s the adjective 'floppy' was in use to describe anything that drooped or dangled without stiffness, such as a hat brim or a dog's ears. The single 'p' of 'flop' doubles before the '-y' ending, following the regular English rule for a short stressed vowel, and that doubled 'p' is the small spelling point worth remembering. In the late twentieth century the word gained fresh life in computing, where a thin, bendable magnetic 'floppy disk' contrasted with rigid hard disks.

How the word is built

• flop (to fall or hang loosely)
• -p- (doubled consonant)
• -y (adjective suffix)