Other forms: lips
Your lips are the two soft edges of your mouth. They shape sounds, hold a cup, and go pale in the cold.
The word gives English a great deal of idiom about speech and courage: keeping a stiff upper lip means showing no feeling under strain, and my lips are sealed means the secret is safe. Paying lip service to something means praising it without acting on it. Objects have lips too, since a jug has one for pouring. Informally, giving somebody lip means answering back rudely.
1nounlipEither of the two fleshy edges of the mouth.
“She bit her lip and said nothing.”
2nounrimThe rim or edge of a container.
“There was a chip on the lip of the jug.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
Also accepted in games: lips
The lip is the drooping part. Proto-Indo-European leb meant to hang loosely or to sag, which is also why the rim of a jug is called one.
Proto-Indo-European
*leb- — to hang loosely, droop, sag
Proto-Germanic
*lepô
Proto-West Germanic
*lippjō — lip
Old English
lippa
Middle English
lippe
English, today
lip
Built from
From Middle English lippe, from Old English lippa, lippe (“lip”), from Proto-West Germanic lippjō (“lip”), from Proto-Germanic lepô, from Proto-Indo-European leb- (“to hang loosely, droop, sag”). Cognate with stq Lippe (“lip”), West Frisian lippe (“lip”), Dutch lip (“lip”), German Lippe and Lefze (“lip”), Low German Lippe (“lip”), lb Lëps (“lip”), wym łyp (“lip”), Yiddish ליפּ (“lip”), Danish læbe (“lip”), Norwegian Bokmål leppe (“lip”), Norwegian Nynorsk leppa, leppe, lippa, lippe (“lip”), Swedish läpp (“lip”), Latin labium (“lip”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA