Swipe

How to spell swipe

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce swipe

What does swipe mean?

1. verbTo pass a card through a reader, or to drag a finger across a touchscreen.
2. verbTo take something quickly and without permission; to steal in a casual way.
3. nounA sweeping blow or stroke, or a single pass of a card or finger.

Swipe in a sentence

• verb

  Please swipe your card at the terminal to pay.

• verb

  Someone tried to swipe my umbrella from the office lobby.

• noun

  The cat took a quick swipe at the dangling string.

• verb

  You can swipe left on the screen to dismiss the notification.

• verb

  The kids will swipe snacks from the pantry the moment your back is turned.

• noun

  A single swipe of the card unlocked the door.

Where does swipe come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Swipe entered English in the early 1800s as a colloquial relative of the much older verb 'sweep', which goes back to the Old English swapan, meaning 'to sweep along' or 'to rush'. The vowel shift from 'sweep' to 'swipe' followed a common English pattern of producing punchy informal variants, and the word first described a hard, sweeping blow, especially in cricket and boxing. From that sweeping-stroke idea it gained the slang sense 'to steal', the image being a quick snatching sweep of the hand. In the late twentieth century it took on the now-everyday meaning of passing a magnetic card through a reader, and then the touchscreen gesture of dragging a finger across glass. Because it is spelled exactly as it sounds, with the long 'i' written 'i-e', the word holds few traps, though its kinship with 'sweep' explains why both share that initial 'sw'.

How the word is built

• swipe (a single morpheme; an English root with no prefix or suffix, historically a variant of 'sweep')