Sap

How to spell sap

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce sap

What does sap mean?

1. nounThe watery fluid that circulates inside a plant or tree, carrying nutrients.
2. verbTo drain or weaken something gradually, especially strength, energy, or resolve.
3. nounA foolish or gullible person who is easily deceived or taken advantage of.

Sap in a sentence

• noun

  The maple sap is boiled down to make syrup.

• verb

  Long shifts and short nights slowly sap her motivation.

• noun

  Some sap paid full price for a phone that was clearly broken.

• noun

  Sticky sap oozed from the cut branch and coated the saw.

• verb

  Constant complaints can sap the morale of an entire team.

• noun

  He felt like a complete sap after falling for the scam email.

Where does sap come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The plant-fluid sense of sap comes straight from Old English saep, which named the watery juice that circulates inside a tree or plant, and it has close cousins across the Germanic languages, including Middle Dutch sap and Old High German saf. Because the word is so old and native, it never picked up extra letters, which is why the spelling stays as short and plain as the sound. The verb meaning 'to drain or weaken gradually' has a separate and surprising history: it grew out of the old military term for undermining a wall by digging a trench called a sappe, borrowed in the 1500s from French sappe and ultimately from Italian zappa, a spade or mattock. Soldiers who dug these approach trenches were called sappers, and from the slow, secret work of digging away foundations came the figurative sense of quietly exhausting someone's energy. The informal British sense meaning a foolish or gullible person is unrelated again, probably a clipping of the older slang 'sapskull', literally a head as soft as sapwood. These distinct streams happen to have collapsed onto one tidy three-letter spelling.

How the word is built

• sap (single Old English root, no affixes)