Taper

How to spell taper

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce taper

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does taper mean?

1. verbTo become gradually narrower toward one end, or to diminish little by little.
2. nounA slender candle, or a long wax-coated wick used to transfer a flame.

Taper in a sentence

• verb

  The trousers taper neatly from the knee to the ankle.

• noun

  He lit each lamp from a single wax taper carried around the hall.

• verb

  Sales tend to taper off once the holiday season ends.

• noun

  A thin taper glowed on the windowsill through the evening.

Where does taper come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word descends from the Old English tapor or tapur, a name for a candle or a wax-coated wick used to carry a flame. Its deeper origin is genuinely uncertain, but the most widely accepted explanation is that it is a dissimilated form of the Latin papyrus, the reed whose dried pith was used as the burning core inside early candles; the repeated p sound is thought to have shifted to a t to make the word easier to say. From the noun for the slim candle came the verb sense, since such a candle narrows toward its tip, giving us the modern idea of something growing gradually thinner or fading away by degrees. The everyday spelling trap is the unstressed final syllable and the identical sound of the animal name tapir, with which it is a perfect homophone. Despite looking like 'tape' plus '-er', the word is one inherited stem rather than a tape and an ending.

How the word is built

• tape (from Old English tapor: candle/wick)
• -er (agent/comparative-looking ending; here part of the inherited stem)