rope

Meanings

Noun

• Thick strings, yarn, monofilaments, metal wires, or strands of other cordage that are twisted together to form a stronger line.
• An individual length of such material.
• A cohesive strand of something.
• A continuous stream.
• A hard line drive.
• A long thin segment of soft clay, either extruded or formed by hand.
• A data structure resembling a string, using a concatenation tree in which each leaf represents a character.
• A kind of chaff consisting of foil strips with paper chutes attached.
• A unit of distance equivalent to the distance covered in six months by a god flying at ten million miles per second.
• A necklace of at least 1 meter in length.
• Cordage of at least 1 inch in diameter, or a length of such cordage.
• A unit of length equal to 20 feet.
• Rohypnol.
• Death by hanging.
• The small intestines.

Verb

• To tie (something) with rope.
• To throw a rope (or something similar, e.g. a lasso, cable, wire, etc.) around (something).
• To climb by means of a rope or ropes.
• To be formed into rope; to draw out or extend into a filament or thread.
• To commit suicide, particularly by hanging.

Related

Similar words

• tie, bind, secure
• lasso

Origin

• From Middle English rop, rope, from Old English rāp, from Proto-West Germanic *raip, from Proto-Germanic *raipaz, *raipą, from Proto-Indo-European *h₁roypnós, from *h₁reyp-.
• Cognate with Scots rape, raip, Saterland Frisian Roop, West Frisian reap, Dutch roop, reep, German Low German Reep, Swedish rep, Icelandic reipi, Albanian rrip.
• From Middle English ropen, rope, from rop; see above.
• From Middle English rop, from Old English rop, ropp; compare Middle Dutch rop, roppe.
• The modern pronunciation results from phonological assimilation to Etymology 1.