Pip

How to spell pip

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce pip

What does pip mean?

1. nounA small seed found inside a fruit such as an apple, orange, or grape.
2. nounA small spot or symbol marking the value on dice, dominoes, or playing cards.
3. verbTo defeat someone by a very narrow margin (chiefly British informal).

Pip in a sentence

• noun

  She spat a stray pip into the compost bin.

• noun

  The four of clubs shows four of each pip on its face.

• verb

  A faster final lap let her pip the favourite to the line.

• noun

  Every slice of the orange held at least one pip.

• noun

  Each die carries a different number of pip on every side.

• verb

  Their team managed to pip the visitors with a last-minute goal.

Where does pip come from?

Language of origin: French

The fruit-seed sense of pip is a clipped form of the older English word pippin, which named an apple grown from seed and came into English in the 1400s from the Old French pepin, meaning the seed or kernel of a fleshy fruit. Over time English speakers shortened pippin to the brisk single syllable pip, keeping only the idea of the small seed itself. The sense meaning a spot on dice, dominoes, or playing cards appears later, in the 1600s, and its origin is genuinely uncertain; it may be an altered form of an older word peep or simply a separate small coinage for a tiny mark. The British verb meaning to beat someone by a narrow margin, as in pipped at the post, grew up in sporting slang in the late 1800s and is probably connected to the idea of a single small point deciding a contest. Because the word is so short and phonetically plain, its various meanings have stayed tidily bundled under one easy spelling.

How the word is built

• pip (single unit: a seed, a spot, or a short sound; from earlier pippin)