Other forms: moped, mopping, mops, mopped, moping
A mop is the soft wet tool on a stick for washing floors. Strings or a sponge head, and a bucket that goes with it.
The verb goes with it, so you mop the kitchen, and mopping up means finishing off the last of something, which the army uses for clearing the final resistance. You also mop your brow with a handkerchief. There is a nice descriptive use for hair, since a mop of curls means a thick untidy head of them. The word is short and old and has resisted every attempt to replace it.
Latin
mappa — napkin, cloth
wa
mappe — napkin
Middle English
mappe
English, today
mop
From Middle English mappe (also as mappel), perhaps borrowed from wa mappe (“napkin”), from Latin mappa (“napkin, cloth”). Believed to be from a sem source, variously claimed as phn - or xpu - (the latter by Quintilian). Compare Modern Hebrew מַפָּה (“a map; a cloth”) (shortened from מַנְפָּה (“fluttering banner, streaming cloth”)). a doublet of map and nape and nappe.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA