noun
- soft food for infants or invalids, as bread soaked in water or milk.
- an idea, talk, book, or the like, lacking substance or real value.
noun Chiefly Dialect.
- a teat; nipple.
- something resembling a teat or nipple.
noun
- any soft or semiliquid food, such as bread softened with milk, esp for babies or invalids; mash
- Southern African porridge made from maize
- worthless or oversimplified ideas; drivelintellectual pap
noun
- Scot and Northern English dialect a nipple or teat
-
- something resembling a breast or nipple, such as (formerly) one of a pair of rounded hilltops
- (capital as part of a name)the Pap of Glencoe
verb paps, papping or papped (tr)
- (of the paparazzi) to follow and photograph (a famous person)
n.1“soft food for infants,” late 14c., from Old French pape “watered gruel,” from Latin pappa, a widespread word in children’s language for “food” (e.g. Middle High German and Dutch pap, German Pappe, Spanish, Portuguese papa, Italian pappa), imitative of an infant’s noise when hungry; possibly associated with pap (n.2). Meaning “over-simplified idea” first recorded 1540s. n.2“nipple of a woman’s breast,” c.1200, first attested in Northern and Midlands writing, probably from a Scandinavian source (not recorded in Old Norse, but cf. dialectal Swedish pappe), from PIE imitative root *pap- “to swell” (cf. Latin papilla “nipple,” papula “a swelling, pimple;” Lithuanian papas “nipple”). n.3“older man,” 1844, shortening of papa. n.
- Soft or semiliquid food, as for infants.