Pap

How to spell pap

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce pap

What does pap mean?

1. nounSoft, semi-liquid food suitable for babies or invalids; by extension, bland, undemanding reading or entertainment with little substance.

Pap in a sentence

• The nurse spooned a little warm pap to the recovering patient.

• Critics dismissed the new soap opera as harmless evening pap.

Where does pap come from?

Language of origin: Other

Pap is one of those words that grew straight out of baby talk, the easy 'pa-pa' sound a small child makes while feeding. It appears in Middle English from around the 1400s, meaning a soft, semi-liquid food fed to infants or to the sick, and it has close cousins across Europe, including the Latin nursery word pappa for food and the German Pappe for paste or mush. Because the word imitates a sound rather than descending from a single ancestral root, it turns up independently in many languages with much the same meaning. Over time the literal 'soft mush' sense produced a sharp figurative use: writing or entertainment that is bland, undemanding, and offers no real nourishment for the mind. There is also an older, quite separate strand in which pap meant a nipple or teat, again echoing the feeding theme, though that use is now archaic or dialectal. The spelling is mercifully simple, three letters that mirror the plain sound, which is why the trap is its shortness rather than any silent letter.

How the word is built

• pap (a single root, imitative of an infant's feeding sound; no prefix or suffix)