strop

Meanings

Noun

• A strap; more specifically a piece of leather or a substitute (notably canvas), or strip of wood covered with a suitable material, for honing a razor, in this sense also called razor strop.
• A bad mood or temper (see stroppy.)
• A piece of rope spliced into a circular wreath, and put round a block for hanging it.
• A poor-quality or unsaleable diamond.

Verb

• To strap.
• (recorded since 1842; now most used) To hone (a razor) with a strop.
• To mark a sequence of letters syntactically as having a special property, such as being a keyword, e.g. by enclosing in apostrophes as in 'foo' or writing in uppercase as in FOO.

Related

Similar words

• huff

Origin

• Same as strap (which see); recorded in English since 1702.
• From apostrophe, due to use of apostrophes as single quotation marks to indicate boldface in ALGOL 60. Other methods were used, especially in ALGOL 68, where the earlier matched apostrophes were no longer common, and the term became used more generally for any such method.