Other forms: leaps, leaping, leapt, leaped
To leap is to push off the ground and travel through the air. A cat leaps onto the windowsill, you leap over a puddle on the way to the bus, a keeper leaps sideways and gets a hand to the ball.
Leap is bigger and more sudden than jump, and its past is leapt or leaped, both correct. As a noun it is the jump itself and also a sharp rise: prices took a leap, sales leaped by a third overnight. It runs through a set of everyday phrases — a leap of faith, progress by leaps and bounds, a leap year with its extra day in February, leaping at the chance when somebody offers you one. You leap to your feet when the phone rings at two in the morning. What you cannot do is leap slowly; the speed and the force are inside the word.
1verbleapTo spring off the ground and through the air in one strong movement.
“She leaped across the stream and landed on the far bank.”
2verbsoarTo rise or increase suddenly and by a large amount.
“Ticket prices leaped as soon as the festival was announced.”
3nounjumpA jump, especially a long or powerful one.
“One leap took him from the wall to the roof.”
4nounadvanceA sudden large increase or advance.
“The new engine is a leap forward in efficiency.”
leap is a way of moving.
Also accepted in games: jump, spring
Leap goes back through Middle English lepen to Old English hleapan and Proto-Germanic *hlaupana, a verb that was about running as much as jumping. German laufen and Dutch lopen still mean 'to run'; English kept the jumping half. The same root, taking longer roads through other languages, also gave us gallop, elope and interlope.
Proto-Germanic
*hlaupaną
Proto-West Germanic
*hlaupan
Old English
hlēapan
Middle English
lepen
English, today
leap
From Middle English lepen, from Old English hlēapan, from Proto-West Germanic hlaupan, from Proto-Germanic hlaupaną. a doublet of lope and lowp and elope and gallop and galop and interlope and loop. Cognate with frr laap, luup, luupe (“to jog, run, walk”), stq lope, loope (“to run”), West Frisian ljeppe (“to jump”), Dutch lopen (“to run; to walk”), German laufen (“to run; to walk”), li loupe (“to jog, run, walk”), Low German lopen, loupen (“to run”), lb lafen (“to run”), wym łaojfa (“to run”), Danish løbe (“to run”), Faroese leypa (“to jump”), Icelandic hlaupa (“to run; to jump”), Norwegian Bokmål løpe (“to run”), Norwegian Nynorsk laupa, laupe, løpa, løpe (“to run”), Swedish löpa (“to run”), from Proto-Indo-European klewb- (“to spring, stumble”) (compare Lithuanian šlùbti ‘to become lame’, klùbti ‘to stumble’).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA