Stop

How to spell stop

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce stop

What does stop mean?

1. verbTo cease moving, acting, or operating, or to cause something to do so.
2. nounA place where a bus, train, or journey halts, or an act of ceasing.

Stop in a sentence

• verb

  Please stop the engine before you leave the car.

• noun

  The bus stop outside the office is closed for repairs.

• verb

  The rain did not stop until late in the evening.

• noun

  They made a brief stop for coffee on the long drive.

Where does stop come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word stop traces back to the Old English verb stoppian, which meant 'to plug up' or 'to block an opening', and the related noun forptoppung for a stoppage. Scholars believe the underlying source was a Vulgar Latin verb stuppare, meaning 'to stuff or plug with tow' (tow being the coarse fibres of flax), built on stuppa, the Latin word for that flax fibre, itself borrowed from Greek styppe. The earliest English sense was therefore very physical: you stopped a hole or a leak by stuffing it. Over the centuries the meaning broadened from plugging a gap to halting movement or activity in general, which is the everyday sense today. The same root gives us 'stopper' and 'estop', the legal term, and the spelling stays pleasingly simple with its single short vowel and doubled p only ever appearing in inflected forms like stopped.

How the word is built

• stop (a single Old English root, no prefix or suffix)