Other forms: stripped, strips, striped, stripping, striping
To strip something is to take off whatever covers it until only the bare surface is left. You strip wallpaper off a wall in long satisfying sheets, strip old paint from a door, strip the bed on a Sunday morning.
Strip takes clothes off as well as paint: he stripped to the waist, she stripped and got into the sea. Strip someone OF something removes a title or a right — stripped of her medal, stripped of his licence. Mechanics strip an engine down to its parts, and a stripped screw is one whose thread has worn smooth. As a noun it is a long narrow piece: a strip of paper, a strip of land along the coast, a comic strip, and in British English the kit a football team plays in. Do not mix strip with stripe, which is a band of colour rather than a shape.
1verbstripTo remove a covering layer from something, leaving the bare surface underneath.~2%
“It took a whole weekend to strip the paint off the banisters.”
2verbclothesTo take clothes off yourself or someone else.~14%
“He stripped to the waist and slid under the car.”
3verbtitleTo take something away from someone, especially a title, rank or right.~2%
“The runner was stripped of her medal a year after the race.”
4verbmachineTo take a machine apart into its separate pieces.~2%
“They stripped the engine down on newspaper spread over the kitchen floor.”
5nounlongA long narrow piece of something.~80%
“She tore the page into thin strips and fed them to the fire.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 13 sentences found in the wild and placed 13 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Strip has a trail that goes cold fast. It is either an altered form of stripe or a borrowing of Middle Low German strippe, and beyond that the guess is a lost Proto-Germanic strong verb strīpaną. Outside Germanic it has almost no relatives at all, bar Irish sríab, a line or stripe.
Proto-Germanic
*strīpaną
Middle Low German
strippe
English, today
strip
From alteration of stripe or from Middle Low German strippe, of uncertain ultimate origin, perhaps derived from a lost strong verb Proto-Germanic strīpaną, with no clear cognates outside of Germanic except for Irish sríab (“line, stripe”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA