floppy

UK/ˈflɒ.pi/US/ˈflɒ.pi/

adjectiveB1+Common in everyday speech and writing · #7,813 of 15,258neutral

Floppy means so soft and bendy that it wobbles and flaps about instead of holding its shape. A floppy hat, floppy ears, gone floppy.

It is affectionate of ears and hats and worrying of anything that should be firm — a floppy child is a medical sign. The floppy disk was named because the early ones genuinely flopped; the later hard-cased ones kept the name and the save icon kept the shape. Note flop, from which it comes.

Definitions of floppy

1adjectivefloppySo soft and bendy that it flaps instead of holding its shape.B1+
“She wore a wide floppy hat to keep the sun off her face.”
synonyms: limp, droopy

floppy is a quality of limpness.

Where it comes from

From flop + -y.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire

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floppy in the wild

A floppy disk, diskette, or floppy diskette is a type of disk storage made from a thin, flexible disk coated with a magnetic storage medium.
Floppy disk
The first floppy disks, invented and made by IBM in 1971, had a disk diameter of 8 inches.
Floppy disk
The name was initially used for Apple's high-density floppy disk drive, and later for the internal CD and DVD drive integrated with Apple computers.
SuperDrive
By the 1990s, the floppy disk was increasingly giving way to hard drives, which required similar controllers.
Floppy disk controller
In 1967, at an IBM facility in San Jose, California, work began on a drive that led to the world's first floppy disk and disk drive.
History of the floppy disk

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

flop

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