I just used the word epiphany, in a post.
As:
“Ain’t it just an epiphany?”
Got me wondering.
Is that where pip comes from? I know it can mean a just hatched bird. Or a seed.
But before that?
@Johanna ? You around?
From Old French pepin (a seed), probably from a root like Vulgar Latin *pép, an expressive creation used to express smallness. It has a bunch of other meanings too.
Epiphany is from Greek epi- ‘on’ plus phaneia ‘shine, appear’. Epiphaines ‘in view’. Epiphaino ‘come into view’.
I think a lot of modern-day people are familiar with the word from the Sherlock Holmes story, “The Five Orange Pips”.
How so? I think “pip” is a very common word. I expect it was in widespread use before the Sherlock Holmes story. Do you have a reason to think otherwise?
Also, a pip is a dot on a die.
Sorry. What I meant was that for some American English speakers, the Conan Doyle story is where they first encountered the word. At least it was for me.
The last word in the last episode of All in the Family is “pip”.
You know somethin’, Archie? You’re a pip. A real pip.
Lucky 10,000 and all that, but is the word really uncommon in American English?
In one of the Our Gang shorts, Miss Crabtree was referred to as a ‘pip.’
Short for pippin, a sort of small apple.
Isn’t there some kind of mechanical problem/thing called a pip?
Speaking of hearing it in a movie or TV show, Sean Connery called his pipe a ‘pip’ in that older version of Murder on the Orient Express.
I always get a tickle when I hear that.
The most common use in English for “pip” is one of the spots on a die or domino.
When I first read the Holmes story (and hence, forever more stuck in my imagination that way), I didn’t know what an “orange pip” was, and imagined it as being that little blossom bit on the end of the fruit that you pop off when you’re peeling it. Which, really, doesn’t change the story at all, since all that matters is that it’s a handful of small, mundane objects that have a coded significance.
This may be an AmE thing. In my HibE and, I’m pretty sure, in BrE the most common sense is the seed of a fruit — apple pips, orange pips, etc. The word could also mean the fruit itself, but it has largely died out in that sense.
This sense comes from pippin (which survives in the name of some apple varieties e.g. Cox’s orange pippin) which had the same sense and which came from Old French. There are related words in other Romance languages — pepita in Spanish; pippo in Tuscan. But if there was a common Latin root, it’s lost.
There’s a separate sense of pip — a respiratory disease of birds. This is older than the “seed” sense, but is not much used outside poultry and veterinary contexts. It has a different etymology — it comes from Dutch, and ultimately from post-classical Latin pituita, phlegm or mucus.
There’s colloquial “annoying” sense of the word (“it gives me the pip”). It comes from pip, the respiratory disease, not pip, the seed. In BrE pip is the annoyance, irritation or gloom caused by an annoying person, thing or event.
But there’s an almost exactly opposite colloquial sense of pip in AmE — something remarkable good (“He landed himself a pip of a job”) and this comes from the fruit, seed sense.
Like Miss Crabtree!
Or Top Cat.
Can mean a lot of things. Used to be on BBC radio when they were announcing the time.
How many piece-moves you have in backgammon; you start the game needing to move all of your pieces a collective 167 pips. If you roll a 1 & a 2 on your two dice, you can move one piece one ‘space’/pip & (the same or) another piece two spaces/pips (subject to the rules of that space being available). Given they go hand-in-hand but are different, I wonder if there was a common root to both
So, what kind of Pips were the guys singing behind Gladys Knight?
I knew this word was interesting.
Thanks, beck for a pip of a thread!