Hops

How to spell hops

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce hops

What does hops mean?

1. verbMakes a short jump or a series of light, springing movements, often on one foot.
2. nounThe dried green cones of the hop vine, used to give beer its bitter flavour and to preserve it.

Hops in a sentence

• verb

  The rabbit hops across the lawn every morning.

• noun

  The brewer added the hops near the end of the boil for extra aroma.

• verb

  She hops onto the train just before the doors close.

• noun

  Local farms grow hops for the regional craft breweries.

Where does hops come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This little word actually braids together two different Germanic threads that ended up spelled the same way. The verb 'hop' descends from the Old English 'hoppian', meaning to leap or spring on one foot, and it has kept that bouncing sense unbroken for well over a thousand years, sharing roots with similar words across the old Germanic languages. The plant sense is younger and travelled a different road: the brewing 'hop' came into English in the 1400s from the Middle Dutch 'hoppe', the name of the climbing vine whose green cones flavour and preserve beer, arriving with the Flemish and Dutch brewers who popularised the bitter, hopped ale that eventually overtook older unhopped drinks. Because both roots were short, plain everyday Germanic words, the spelling stayed simple, and adding the regular '-s' covers both the plant gathered in quantity and the third-person verb. There is no silent letter or hidden vowel to trip over, which is exactly why the word almost never causes trouble in writing.

How the word is built

• hop (verb/noun root)
• -s (plural noun / third-person singular verb)