Other forms: cups
A cup is a small container with a handle, used for drinking tea or coffee. A cup of tea, hold the cup, cup and saucer.
A cup has a handle and a mug is bigger and thicker; the distinction is real in Britain and loose elsewhere. In cooking, an American cup is a unit of volume of about 237 millilitres, which is why American recipes measure flour by volume and British ones by weight. A cup is also a trophy and by extension the competition. Note not my cup of tea, meaning not to my taste.
1nouncupA small container with a handle for drinking.
“Would you like a cup of tea while you wait?”
Patterna cup of + noun (tea, coffee, sugar) · cup and saucer · a paper / plastic cup
2nountrophyA trophy, or the competition for it.
“Our team finally won the cup after losing three finals in a row.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
cup is a drinking vessel.
Also accepted in games: mug
cUp → the U is the cup itself
Look at the u in the middle: round at the bottom and open at the top, it is already a little cup waiting for tea.
Old English cuppe came from Latin cuppa, probably from cupa, a tub. Cupola and cupboard come from the same hollow, and a cupboard was literally a board for cups.
Old English
cuppe
Middle English
cuppe
English, today
cup
From Middle English cuppe, from Old English cuppe. Middle English cuppe, coppe, from the merger of Old English cuppe (“cup”) and Old English copp (“cup, vessel”). Old English cuppe is a borrowing from Latin cuppa, itself of unknown origin, but probably from earlier Latin cūpa (“tub, cask”), from Proto-Indo-European kewp- (“a hollow”). Old English copp, however, is from Proto-West Germanic kopp (“round object, bowl, vessel, knoll, summit, crown of the head”), from Proto-Germanic kuppaz, from Proto-Indo-European gew- (“to bend, curve, arch”) (whence also obsolete English cop (“top, summit, crown of the head”), German Kopf (“top, head”)).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA