pap

Valid in Scrabble

Scrabble points: 7
Words With Friends: 9
Letters: 3

Pronunciation

/pæp/

See all 2 pronunciations

/pæp/ · /pap/

Definition of pap

32 senses · 4 parts of speech · etymology included

noun

(uncountable)Food in the form of a soft paste, often a porridge, especially as given to very young children.

“Pap can be made from bread boiled in milk or water.”

See all 32 definitions

noun

(uncountable)Food in the form of a soft paste, often a porridge, especially as given to very young children.

“Pap can be made from bread boiled in milk or water.”
(colloquial, uncountable)Pablum or nonsense.
(South-Africa, countable, uncountable)Porridge.

“Pap and wors are traditionally eaten at a braai.”
(Africa, Nigeria, West, countable, uncountable)A fermented cereal pudding made from corn, sorghum, or millet
(countable, derogatory, informal, uncountable)Support from official patronage.

“Treasury pap”
(countable, uncountable)The pulp of fruit.

“I hold it not amisse to take Pills in the pap of a rosted apple.”
“A child's head is naturally as soft as the pap of an apple.”
(archaic)A female breast or nipple.

“But th'other rather higher did arise, / And her two lilly paps aloft displayd, / And all, that might his melting hart entise / To her delights, she vnto him bewrayd […]”
“they doe not onely weare jewels at their noses, in their lip and cheekes, and in their toes, but also big wedges of gold through their paps [translating tetins] and buttocks[…].”
“And it came to pass, as he spake these things, a certain woman of the company lifted up her voice, and said unto him, Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the paps which thou hast sucked.”
“I took the dagger out and kissed it. / Like a cat’s tongue that daintily laps, / I slipped it in between her paps.”
(archaic)A man's breast.

“Adrianus the Emperour made his Physition to marke and take the just compasse of the mortall place about his pap, that so his aime might not faile him, to whom he had given charge to kill him.”
A rounded, nipple-like hill or peak.

“the paps of Jura”
(alt-of)Alternative letter-case form of Pap (“Pap smear”).
(abbreviation, alt-of, clipping, informal)Clipping of paparazzo.

“As he made his way from the London hotel to his car, the singer threatened to beat up a pap who got in his way.”
“We turn back onto the main road and I'm relieved to not see any paps. They've got to be somewhere though. They don't just leave.”
“The only aspect of his mother’s death that he finds unforgettable is the identity of those who caused it: the press and the paps, variously referred to as ghouls, pustules, dogs, weasels, idiots and sadists, who after “torturing” his mother “would come for me”.”
(informal)Pa; father.
polyfluoroalkyl phosphate ester
(abbreviation, alt-of, initialism)Initialism of password authentication protocol.
(abbreviation, alt-of)Abbreviation of past active participle.
(abbreviation, alt-of)Abbreviation of present active participle.
(abbreviation, alt-of, initialism)Initialism of principle of alternate possibilities.
(abbreviation, alt-of, initialism)Initialism of prostatic acid phosphatase.
(abbreviation, alt-of, initialism)Initialism of participatory anthropic principle.
(abbreviation, acronym, alt-of)Acronym of positive airway pressure.
(broadly)Acronym of positive airway pressure.
(abbreviation, alt-of, ellipsis)Ellipsis of Pap smear.

“If you have any abnormal symptoms, such as spotting between periods or bleeding after intercourse, keep pursuing the cause even if your last Pap was normal.”

verb

(obsolete, transitive)To feed with pap.

“But I'll so pap him up - nothing too dear for him : What a sweet scent he has !”
(informal)To take a surreptitious photograph of (someone, especially a celebrity) without their consent.

“Look, that pop star’s been papped in her bikini again!”
“The star of Netflix’s Wednesday, 20-year-old Jenna Ortega (another Gen Z actor) was recently papped holding an iPhone and chuffing on a straight cigarette (the fact that this was a pap photo is all the more throwback).”
“We know everyone else knew he was a Tier 1 sex offender because when the pair got papped on a walk in Central Park, the New York Post published the picture with a front page headline even Andrew could understand: “PRINCE & PERV”.”
(Internet, alt-of)Alternative letter-case form of PAP (“post a picture”).
(Internet, abbreviation, acronym)Post a picture.

adj

(South-Africa, slang)Weak, feeble; lacking substance.

“His chest hangs like soft tits in his vest. He is pap. I could easily hit him. I could kill him if I wanted to.”
(South-Africa, slang)Spineless, wet, without character.

“He is so pap and boring.”
(South-Africa, slang)Flat.

“I got a puncture and the wheel went pap.”

name

(abbreviation, alt-of, initialism)Initialism of People's Action Party.

“@Gary, are you a PAP agent? ... =) trying to incite rebellion and revolution on this site so that the govt will have an excuse to take down this site?”
(Singlish, derogatory)Pay And Pay (nickname for the People's Action Party)
(abbreviation, alt-of, initialism)Initialism of People's Armed Police.

Definitions from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA.

Etymology

See full etymology

From Middle English pap. Related to Middle Low German pappe, Dutch pap, German Pappe (“pap, porridge; wheatpaste; cardboard”), Old French papa/pape, Latin pappa, Bulgarian папам (papam, “to eat”) and Serbo-Croatian папати/papati (“to eat”), among others. The relationships between these words are difficult to reconstruct. The Germanic word is either a borrowing from Latin or, perhaps more probably, an independent formation in baby-talk.