Prop

How to spell prop

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce prop

What does prop mean?

1. verbTo support, hold up, or keep in position, often by leaning against something.
2. nounA rigid object placed beneath or against something to hold it up.
3. nounA portable object used by actors on a stage or film set, short for property.

Prop in a sentence

• verb

  He used a brick to prop the door open during the move.

• noun

  A wooden prop kept the heavy gate from swinging shut.

• noun

  The actor reached for a prop that had been left in the wrong spot.

• verb

  Workers had to prop the sagging ceiling before repairs could begin.

• noun

  The tent stayed upright thanks to a single central prop.

• noun

  Each prop on the film set was logged and stored after filming.

Where does prop come from?

Language of origin: Dutch

Prop arrived in late Middle English, around the 1400s, from the Middle Dutch proppe, which named a stake or stout pole used to hold up vines and branches. Dutch and Flemish gardeners and traders carried the word across the North Sea, and English speakers used it first for the timber stays that kept loaded fruit trees and beams from collapsing. From that literal sense of a physical support it broadened into the figurative idea of anything that holds something else up, whether a structure, a sagging economy, or a person in need. The much later theatrical and cinematic sense is a clipped form of 'property', the items an actor handles on stage, while the aviation sense is simply a casual shortening of 'propeller'. Because the spelling is short and phonetically regular, the only real choice a writer faces is whether to double the final consonant when adding endings, as in 'propped' and 'propping'.

How the word is built

• prop (shortened form; from Middle Dutch proppe: support, stake)