Piper

How to spell piper

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce piper

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does piper mean?

1. nounA person who plays a pipe or set of pipes, especially the bagpipes.

Piper in a sentence

• A lone piper played at the front of the wedding procession.

• The regiment hired a piper to lead the parade each morning.

Where does piper come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is an old native English word, recorded as 'pipere' in Old English long before the Norman Conquest. It is simply an agent noun built from 'pipe', the name for a tube and for the reed instrument played by blowing through such a tube. The underlying 'pipe' itself goes back to a Latin root, 'pipare', meaning 'to chirp' or 'to peep', an imitation of the thin high sound a young bird makes; the same idea fed words across the Germanic and Romance languages. By the Middle Ages a 'piper' was firmly understood as someone who plays a pipe or set of pipes, and the word became woven into folklore and proverb, as in the saying about who pays the piper. The spelling is regular: the long 'i' comes from the silent final 'e' in 'pipe', which is preserved when you simply add the agent ending.

How the word is built

• pipe (tube, musical reed instrument)
• -er (agent suffix: one who does)