Other forms: ropes, roped, roping
A rope is a thick line you can pull hard on without it snapping — fibres twisted together until they will hold a boat, a tent or a person. The washing line, the rope on a swing under a tree, the coil in the boot of the car with a hook on the end.
Thickness is the whole difference between the words in this family: thread sews, string ties a parcel, rope takes weight. It works as a verb as well — they roped the ladder to the roof rack, the police roped off the street — and rope somebody in means talking them into helping with something they had no plans to do. Sailing left English a shelf of phrases: learn the ropes, show somebody the ropes, know the ropes, all of them about the dozens of lines on a sailing ship and knowing which one does what. A boxer on the ropes is nearly beaten. And a rope of pearls or onions is a line of them threaded one after another.
1nounropeThick strong cord made by twisting fibres together.~96%
“He tied the boat with a length of rope.”
2verbtieTo tie or fasten something with rope.~2%
“They roped the ladder to the roof rack.”
3nounlineA line of things threaded one after another.~2%
“She wore a rope of pearls.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 7 sentences found in the wild and placed 6 of them on a sense (1 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
rope is a length of twisted fibre.
Old English rāp, and behind it a root meaning to peel or tear a strip off something. A rope starts life as material stripped away — bark off a tree, fibre off a stem — and is then twisted back together until it will take your weight.
Proto-Indo-European
*h₁reyp-
Proto-Indo-European
*h₁roypnós — strap, band, rope
Proto-Germanic
*raipaz
Proto-West Germanic
*raip
Old English
rāp — rope, cord, cable
Middle English
rop
English, today
rope
Built from
From Middle English rop, rope, from Old English rāp (“rope, cord, cable”), from Proto-West Germanic raip, from Proto-Germanic raipaz, raipą (“rope, cord, band, ringlet”), from Proto-Indo-European h₁roypnós (“strap, band, rope”), from h₁reyp- (“to peel off, tear; border, edge, strip”). 2 Cognate with Scots rape, raip (“rope”), stq Roop (“rope”), West Frisian reap (“rope, cord”), Dutch roop, reep (“rope, cord, ring, strip, bar”), German Low German Reep (“rope”), German Reif (“ring, hoop”), Norwegian Bokmål and Swedish rep (“rope”), Faroese and Norwegian Nynorsk reip (“rope”), Danish reb (“rope”), Icelandic reipi (“rope”), Albanian rrip (“belt, rope”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA