Sip
verbTo drink something slowly, taking only a small amount at a time.
How to spell sip
3 letters · 1 syllable
How to pronounce sip
What does sip mean?
- verbTo drink something slowly, taking only a small amount at a time.
- nounA small mouthful of a drink.
Sip in a sentence
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verb
She liked to sip her coffee while reading the morning news.
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noun
She took a careful sip of the hot tea to test the temperature.
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verb
He paused to sip the cold water after the long walk.
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noun
One sip of the medicine was enough to make him grimace.
Where does sip come from?
Language of origin: Germanic
The word sip first appears in late Middle English, around the 1400s, as a verb meaning to drink a little at a time. Its exact ancestry is not fully settled, but it is widely thought to be a softer, lighter cousin of the older verb sup, which meant to take liquid into the mouth and goes back to Old English supan. Both words belong to a wider family of Germanic terms, including the Low German sippen, that describe taking in liquid slowly. The pleasing thing about sip is that its sound seems to imitate the very action it names, the small intake of breath and liquid through pursed lips. Because the word is short and phonetically regular, the single consonants on either side of the vowel are all there is to remember, which is why it almost never trips up a writer.
How the word is built
- sip (single root, of Germanic origin; no prefix or suffix)
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