Rapping

How to spell rapping

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce rapping

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does rapping mean?

1. verbPerforming rhythmic, rhyming spoken lyrics over a musical beat.
2. verbStriking a surface with quick, sharp blows, as when knocking on a door.

Rapping in a sentence

• The teenager spent every evening rapping over beats he made on his laptop.

• Someone was rapping loudly on the front door at midnight.

• She earns a living rapping at clubs and recording her own tracks.

• The impatient customer kept rapping his knuckles against the counter.

Where does rapping come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The base word 'rap' first appears in English in the 1300s as a word for a quick, sharp blow, and it was almost certainly imitative, formed to echo the abrupt knocking sound it names; close relatives turn up in the Scandinavian languages, such as Swedish 'rappa', meaning to beat or strike. From that early sense of striking came the idea of a knock at a door and, by extension, brisk talk, since to 'rap' was to deliver words sharply. In American slang of the twentieth century 'rap' came to mean lively conversation or patter, and from the 1970s it named the musical style of rhythmic, rhyming speech delivered over a beat. The doubled 'p' in 'rapping' simply follows the regular English rule that a short, stressed vowel before a single final consonant doubles that consonant when '-ing' is added. The whole story is worth remembering because 'rapping' is so easily confused with its homophone 'wrapping', which is a wholly unrelated word built on the verb 'wrap'.

How the word is built

• rap (sharp blow; rhythmic speech)
• -p- (doubled consonant)
• -ing (present participle/gerund)

Words that sound like rapping

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• wrapping: Material such as paper or plastic used to cover or enclose something.