Ripe fruit has finished growing and is ready to eat — soft under the thumb, sweet, gone from green to its proper colour. A ripe peach drips down your wrist, a ripe banana is speckled brown, a tomato left on the windowsill turns ripe in a week.
Cheese, wine and compost ripen too, and a ripe cheese can be strong enough to clear a room — which is how ripe on its own came to mean smelly. Away from food it means ready for something to happen: the time is ripe, a market ripe for change, a village ripe for a takeover. In that sense it takes for — ripe FOR investment, ripe FOR reform. A ripe old age is a long life, said with approval. The verb is ripen; the opposite is unripe, or green for fruit that is still hard and sour.
1adjectiveripeFully grown and ready to be eaten or gathered.
“The pears are finally ripe enough to pick.”
Patternripe + noun (fruit, tomato, cheese) · ripen · fully / perfectly ripe · ripe for + noun
synonyms: mature
2adjectivematuredMatured until the flavour is full and strong, as cheese or wine is.
“A ripe blue cheese you could smell from the hallway.”
3adjectiveprimedIn the right condition for something to happen.
“The industry is ripe for a shake-up.”
synonyms: ready, primed
4adjectiveunpleasantSmelling strong and unpleasant.
“The bin was getting ripe in the heat.”
RIPe → RIP it off the branch now
Soft, sweet, and nearly falling off the tree by itself: the fruit is ripe, so rip it off the branch before the birds do.
hooks ontorip
Ripe is one of the old ones: Old English rīpe, 'ripe, mature', from Proto-Germanic *rīpijaz, and behind that a Proto-Indo-European root *h₁reyb- meaning 'to snatch'. Its close English relative is reap. Fruit is ripe when it is ready to be grabbed off the branch — the word for the crop and the word for taking it grew from one idea. German reif and Dutch rijp still stand beside it.
Proto-Indo-European
*h₁reyb- — to snatch
Proto-Germanic
*rīpijaz
Proto-West Germanic
*rīpī
Old English
rīpe — ripe, mature
Middle English
ripe
English, today
ripe
From Middle English ripe, rype, from Old English rīpe (“ripe, mature”), from Proto-West Germanic rīpī, from Proto-Germanic rīpijaz, rīpiz, from Proto-Indo-European h₁reyb- (“to snatch”). Cognate with West Frisian ryp (“ripe”), Dutch rijp (“ripe”), German reif (“ripe”). Related to reap.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA