Stomp

How to spell stomp

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce stomp

What does stomp mean?

1. verbTo bring the foot down heavily and noisily, or to tread on something with deliberate force.
2. nounA heavy, forceful step, or a lively, hard-driving piece of jazz or blues music.

Stomp in a sentence

• verb

  The toddler began to stomp his feet when the toy was taken away.

• noun

  The dancers ended the routine with a single loud stomp on the wooden stage.

• verb

  Workers had to stomp the snow off their boots before entering the warehouse.

• noun

  The band closed the night with a fast piano stomp from the 1920s.

Where does stomp come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Stomp is an American variant of the older verb stamp, which traces back to Old English stempan and a broad Germanic family of words meaning to pound, crush, or press something down with force. The shift from the vowel in stamp to the rounded vowel in stomp happened in regional and informal American speech during the early nineteenth century, and the spelling simply followed the new pronunciation. For a long time it was treated as a colloquial or dialect form, but it gradually earned its own place in standard dictionaries with the specific flavour of heavy, deliberate treading. The word also took on a musical life: by the early twentieth century a stomp was a lively, hard-driving jazz or blues number, immortalised in titles like King Oliver's recordings. The spelling trap is small but real, since writers who know the parent word stamp sometimes drift back to that spelling, so it helps to remember that the rounded o matches the heavier, more forceful sound.

How the word is built

• stomp (variant of stamp: to bring the foot down hard)
• no affix