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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

rope.

Thick strings, yarn, monofilaments, metal wires, or strands of other cordage that are twisted together to form a stronger line.

4 characters1 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

noun/ɹəʊp/Received-Pronunciation/ɹoʊp/General-American/ɹəʉp/Australia/ɹɐʉp/New-Zealand
  1. Thick strings, yarn, monofilaments, metal wires, or strands of other cordage that are twisted together to form a stronger line.

    uncountable
    Nylon rope is usually stronger than similar rope made of plant fibers.
  2. An individual length of such material.

    countable
    The swinging bridge is constructed of 40 logs and 30 ropes.
    All at once, let’s heave on the rope!
  3. A cohesive strand of something.

    countable · uncountable
    The duchess wore a rope of pearls to the soirée.
  4. A continuous stream.

    countable · dated · uncountable
  5. A hard line drive.

    countable · uncountable
    He hit a rope past third and into the corner.
  6. A long thin segment of soft clay, either extruded or formed by hand.

    countable · uncountable
  7. A data structure resembling a string, using a concatenation tree in which each leaf represents a character.

    countable · uncountable
  8. A kind of chaff (material dropped to interfere with radar) consisting of foil strips with paper chutes attached.

    uncountable
  9. A unit of distance equivalent to the distance covered in six months by a god flying at ten million miles per second.

    Jainism · countable · uncountable
  10. A necklace of at least one meter in length.

    countable · uncountable
  11. Cordage of at least one inch in diameter, or a length of such cordage.

    countable · uncountable
  12. A unit of length equal to twenty feet.

    archaic · countable · uncountable
  13. Rohypnol.

    countable · slang · uncountable
  14. Semen being ejaculated.

    countable · plural-normally · slang · uncountable
    shooting ropes
  15. Death by hanging.

    countable · uncountable · with-definite-article
    The murderer was sentenced to the rope.
  16. An apparatus, currently with limited use by the senior contestants and not used in world-wide tournaments.

    countable
  17. An apparatus, currently with limited use by the senior contestants and not used in world-wide tournaments. An apparatus program with a rope.

    countable · metonymically · uncountable
Where this word comes from

From Middle English rop, rope, from Old English rāp (“rope, cord, cable”), from Proto-West Germanic *raip, from Proto-Germanic *raipaz, *raipą (“rope, cord, band, ringlet”), from Proto-Indo-European *h₁roypnós (“strap, band, rope”), from *h₁reyp- (“to peel off, tear; border, edge, strip”). Cognates Cognate with Scots rape, raip (“rope”), Saterland Frisian Roop (“rope”), West Frisian reap (“rope, cord”), Dutch roop, reep (“rope, cord, ring, strip, bar”), German Low German Reep (“rope”), German Reif (“ring, hoop”), Norwegian Bokmål and Swedish rep (“rope”), Faroese and Norwegian Nynorsk reip (“rope”), Danish reb (“rope”), Icelandic reipi (“rope”), Albanian rrip (“belt, rope”).

verb/ɹəʊp/Received-Pronunciation/ɹoʊp/General-American/ɹəʉp/Australia/ɹɐʉp/New-Zealand
  1. To tie (something) with rope.

    transitive
    The robber roped the victims.
  2. To throw a rope (or something similar, e.g. a lasso, cable, wire, etc.) around (something).

    transitive
    The cowboy roped the calf.
  3. To climb by means of a rope or ropes.

    intransitive
  4. To be formed into rope; to draw out or extend into a filament or thread.

    intransitive
  5. To pull or restrain (the horse one is riding) to prevent it from winning a race.

    transitive
  6. To commit suicide, particularly by hanging.

    Internet · intransitive
    My life is a mess; I might as well rope.
Where this word comes from

From Middle English ropen, rope (“to form ropes”), from rop (“rope”); see above.

noun/ɹəʊp/Received-Pronunciation/ɹoʊp/General-American/ɹəʉp/Australia/ɹɐʉp/New-Zealand
  1. The small intestines.

    in-plural
    the ropes of birds
Where this word comes from

From Middle English rop (“gut, intestine”), from Old English rop, ropp; compare Middle Dutch rop, roppe (“fish guts”). The modern pronunciation results from phonological assimilation to Etymology 1.

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.