Rep

How to spell rep

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce rep

What does rep mean?

1. nounA person employed to sell a company's products or services, or to represent a group.
2. nounA single complete performance of an exercise movement, repeated in sets during training.
3. nounA person's or business's standing or reputation, in informal usage.

Rep in a sentence

• The pharmaceutical rep visited three clinics before lunch.

• He managed one more rep before his arms gave out.

• The restaurant built its rep on slow-cooked dishes.

• Our union rep raised the staffing issue at the meeting.

• The trainer told her to add a final rep to each set.

• A late delivery can damage a small firm's rep quickly.

Where does rep come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Rep is a clipping, a word made by lopping off everything except the opening syllable of a longer one. Its commonest source is 'representative', which itself traces to the Latin repraesentare, meaning 'to bring back into presence' or 'to make present again', built from re- 'again' and praesentare 'to present'. The sales sense, a person who presents a company's goods to buyers, became widespread in commercial English during the twentieth century. A separate strand clips 'repetition', a Latin-derived word for 'doing again', and is now standard gym slang for a single performance of an exercise. A third clips 'reputation', the standing one has in others' eyes, surviving in phrases about defending one's rep. Because all three trace back to the Latin prefix re-, meaning 'again' or 'back', the spelling is simply those three letters with no silent traps.

How the word is built

• Clipped form: the first syllable kept from a longer word (representative, repetition, or reputation)