Ramp

How to spell ramp

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce ramp

What does ramp mean?

1. nounA sloping surface joining two levels, allowing people, vehicles, or goods to pass between them.
2. nounA short section of road for entering or leaving a motorway or main road.
3. verbTo increase or decrease something steadily, usually in the phrase 'ramp up' or 'ramp down'.

Ramp in a sentence

• noun

  The warehouse loading ramp made it easy to wheel pallets onto the truck.

• noun

  He signalled early and took the exit ramp toward the city centre.

• verb

  The factory plans to ramp up production before the holiday season.

• noun

  The museum added a ramp so wheelchair users could reach the entrance.

• noun

  Traffic backed up on the entry ramp during the morning rush.

• verb

  Managers decided to ramp down spending after the quarterly review.

Where does ramp come from?

Language of origin: French

Ramp entered English from the Old French verb ramper, which meant 'to climb', 'to crawl', or 'to rear up on the hind legs', a sense still preserved in the heraldic term 'rampant' for a lion standing upright. The verb itself is thought to come from a Frankish or Germanic root suggesting clawing or scrambling movement. In English the word first appeared in the verb sense of rearing or rising up, and only later, by the eighteenth century, settled into the familiar noun meaning of a sloping surface that lets you move smoothly between two levels. The modern figurative phrase 'ramp up', meaning to increase steadily, draws naturally on that original image of climbing or rising. Because the spelling is short and entirely phonetic, the journey from a crawling animal to a wheelchair access slope is the only surprise the word holds.

How the word is built

• ramp (from Old French ramper: to climb, rear up)