Scrap

How to spell scrap

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce scrap

What does scrap mean?

1. nounA small fragment or piece torn or broken from something larger.
2. verbTo abandon or get rid of something as no longer useful.
3. nounDiscarded metal or other material collected for reuse or recycling.

Scrap in a sentence

• noun

  She jotted the number on a scrap of paper.

• verb

  The council decided to scrap the unpopular parking plan.

• noun

  He sold the rusted pipes for scrap at the yard.

• noun

  He saved every scrap of fabric for the quilt.

• verb

  They will scrap the old car for its metal value.

• noun

  The price of scrap rose sharply this year.

Where does scrap come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

Scrap entered English in the late 1300s from Old Norse skrap, a word meaning 'scraps' or 'trifles' and connected to skrapa, 'to scrape'. The underlying idea is of small bits that have been scraped off or left over after the useful part is gone, which is why the earliest English uses referred to fragments of food and other leftovers. From there the sense widened to any small piece broken or torn from something larger, such as a scrap of paper or a scrap of cloth. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it also covered discarded metal and other waste collected for reuse, giving us 'scrap metal' and the verb meaning 'to throw away'. The informal sense of a brief fight or quarrel grew up separately in the early 1800s, probably as a playful shortening of 'scrape' meaning an awkward predicament. The spelling is mercifully phonetic, with the short vowel and the single closing 'p' rarely causing trouble.

How the word is built

• scrap (from Old Norse skrap: scraps, trifles)