flap
Pronunciation: /flæp/
The English word “flap” has 19 meanings listed here.
noun
- Anything broad and flexible that hangs loose, or that is attached by one side or end and is easily moved.
- A hinged leaf.
- A hinged surface on the trailing edge of the wings of an aeroplane, used to increase lift and drag.
- A side fin of a ray.
- The motion of anything broad and loose, or a sound or stroke made with it.
- A controversy, scandal, stir, or upset.
- A consonant sound made by a single muscle contraction, such as the sound /ɾ/ in the standard American English pronunciation of body.
- A piece of tissue incompletely detached from the body, as an intermediate stage of plastic surgery.
- The labia, the vulva.
- A blow or slap (especially to the face).
- A young prostitute.
- A connected component of the induced subgraph formed by deleting a set of vertices.
verb
- To move (something broad and loose) up and down.
- To move loosely back and forth.
- For a goalkeeper to weakly attempt to play a flighted ball with the hands, failing to control it.
- To pronounce (something) as a flap consonant.
- To be pronounced with a flap consonant.
- To be advertised as being available and then unavailable (or available by different routes) in rapid succession.
- To talk, especially in a manner seen as excessive, nagging or annoying.
Etymology
From Middle English flap, flappe (“a slap; blow; buffet; fly-flap; something flexible or loose; flap”), related to Saterland Frisian Flappert (“wing, flipper”), Middle Dutch flabbe (“a blow; slap on the face; fly-flap; flap”) (modern Dutch flap (“flap”)), Middle Low German flabbe, vlabbe, flebbe, from the verb (see below). Related also to English flab and flabby.
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Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.