Other forms: caps, capped, capping, caped
A cap is a soft hat with a stiff peak at the front to keep the sun out of your eyes. The one on the hook by the door — worn forwards, backwards, or pulled low on the bus.
Cap is also the lid: a bottle cap, the cap of a pen, the cap left off the toothpaste. It is an upper limit as well, as noun and verb — a cap on rents, a salary cap, 'bonuses are capped at twenty per cent'. In British sport a cap is one appearance for your national team, so a player with fifty caps has played fifty times. Then there is a mushroom's cap, a swimming cap, a graduation cap and a knee cap. The phrase 'to cap it all' means on top of everything else, and it lands at the end of a run of bad news.
1nouncapA soft hat with a stiff peak at the front.~70%
“He turned his cap round and pulled it down over his eyes.”
2nounlidA lid that screws or presses onto a bottle, a pen, or a tube.~2%
“Someone had left the cap off the milk.”
3nounceilingAn upper limit set on an amount.~13%
“The council put a cap on rent increases.”
4verbsetTo set an upper limit on an amount.~2%
“Bonuses are capped at twenty per cent of salary.”
5nounappearanceAn appearance for a national sports team.~13%
“He earned his first cap against Italy.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 17 sentences found in the wild and placed 15 of them on a sense (2 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
cap is a hat.
Also accepted in games: baseball cap
Cap comes down through Old English cæppe from Latin cappa, a covering or hood, which is built on caput, 'head'. Cape, cope and chape are the same word arriving by other roads — one grew to cover the head, another the shoulders.
Proto-Indo-European
*kap-
Middle English
cappe
English, today
cap
From Middle English cappe. Inherited from Middle English cappe, from Old English cæppe, from Proto-West Germanic kappā (“covering, hood, mantle”), from Latin cappa, itself from Latin caput. a doublet of cape and chape and cope.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA