Other forms: trips, tripped, tripping
A trip is a journey to a place and back again, short rather than long. A day trip to the seaside, a school trip to the museum, a work trip to Berlin on the early flight.
The verb is a completely different picture: to trip is to catch your foot and stumble, as in he tripped over the cable and went down hard. You can trip someone up on purpose with a foot, or trip them up in an argument by catching the mistake. A trip is also what a switch does — a tripped fuse, the alarm was tripped at three in the morning. Then there is the drug sense, informal and unmissable: a bad trip. And hold three words apart — a trip is the whole there-and-back, a journey is the going, and travel is the activity in general and takes no article, so 'I love travel' but never 'a travel'.
1nountripA journey to a place and back, short rather than long.~88%
“We took a day trip to the coast on Sunday.”
synonyms: outing, excursion
2verbloseTo catch your foot on something and lose your balance.~2%
“She tripped on the top step and dropped the box.”
3verbstumbleTo make someone stumble, or to catch someone out in a mistake.~2%
“He put out a foot and tripped the boy on purpose.”
4verbsetTo set off a switch, fuse or alarm.~2%
“The heater tripped the fuse again.”
5nounuseIn informal use, the experience of taking a hallucinogenic drug.~6%
“He described the whole trip in far too much detail.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 18 sentences found in the wild and placed 15 of them on a sense (3 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
trip is a journey.
Middle English trippen meant to step lightly and nimbly, to skip, to dance, and behind it stand Old French triper, 'to hop or dance around', and Middle Dutch trippen, 'to skip, hop, stamp'. Both modern meanings come out of those dancing feet: the light quick step became the short journey, and the misplaced quick step became the stumble.
Middle Dutch
trippen — to skip, trip, hop, stamp, trample
Old French
triper — to hop or dance around, strike with the feet
Middle English
trippen — tread or step lightly and nimbly, skip, dance
English, today
trip
From Middle English trippen (“tread or step lightly and nimbly, skip, dance”), perhaps from Old French triper (“to hop or dance around, strike with the feet”), from a Frankish - source; or alternatively from Middle Dutch trippen (“to skip, trip, hop, stamp, trample”) (> Modern Dutch trippelen (“to toddle, patter, trip”)). Akin to Middle Low German trippen (> Danish trippe (“to trip”), Swedish trippa (“to mince, trip”)), West Frisian tripje (“to toddle, trip”), German trippeln (“to scurry”), Old English treppan (“to trample, tread”). Related also to trap, tramp.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA