Other forms: pipes, piping, piped
A pipe is a tube that carries something along — water, gas, oil, air. The ones under your sink, the one that bursts in a cold January, the drainpipe running down the outside wall.
A pipe is also what people smoke tobacco in: a small bowl with a stem, filled, lit and puffed at. In music, a pipe is a simple tube you blow, which is where organ pipes, bagpipes and pipers all come from. As a verb, you pipe water or gas somewhere along pipes, pipe music into a shop, or pipe icing onto a cake through a bag with a nozzle. Pipe down means be quiet; pipe up means suddenly speak. A pipe dream is a hope with nothing behind it.
1nounpipeA tube that carries water, gas, oil or air from one place to another.~35%
“The pipe under the sink was leaking onto the floor.”
synonyms: tube, duct
2nounsmallA small bowl with a stem, used for smoking tobacco.~15%
“He filled his pipe and sat down by the window.”
3nounsimpleA simple tube-shaped instrument that you blow, or one of the tubes of an organ or a set of bagpipes.~46%
“The lowest pipes of the organ shook the floor.”
4verbsendTo send water, gas or sound somewhere through pipes or wires.~2%
“They piped hot water from one boiler to every flat in the block.”
5verbpushTo push cream or icing through a narrow nozzle to decorate food.~2%
“She piped a border of icing round the edge of the cake.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 21 sentences found in the wild and placed 19 of them on a sense (2 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
pipe is a hollow tube.
Pipe began as a noise. Latin pīpiō meant to chirp or peep, and Vulgar Latin pīpa was the thing that made that sound. Old English already had pīpe from Proto-West Germanic *pīpā, used both for a musical pipe and for the channel of a small stream, and the Latin word reinforced it. The instrument came first; the plumbing borrowed the shape.
Latin
pipire
Vulgar Latin
*pīpa
Proto-West Germanic
*pīpā
Old English
pīpe — pipe (musical instrument); the channel of a small stream
Middle English
pipe
English, today
pipe
Built from
From Middle English pipe, pype (“hollow cylinder or tube used as a conduit or container; duct or vessel of the body; musical instrument; financial records maintained by the English Exchequer, pipe roll”), from Old English pīpe (“pipe (musical instrument); the channel of a small stream”), from Proto-West Germanic pīpā. Reinforced by Vulgar Latin pīpa, from Latin pipire, pipiare, pipare, from pīpiō (“to chirp, peep”), of imitative of the sound origin. Displaced native Old English fealh and þrūh. a doublet of fife. Cognate with Dutch pijp, German Pfeife, Danish pibe, Norwegian Bokmål and Norwegian Nynorsk pipe, Swedish pipa, Faroese and Icelandic pípa. The “storage container” and “liquid measure” senses are derived from Middle English pipe (“large storage receptacle, particularly for wine; cask, vat; measure of volume”), from pīpe (above) and Old French pipe (“liquid measure”). In specific contexts, calques similar units of measure such as Portuguese pipa.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA