Other forms: wrapped, wrapping, wraps
To wrap something is to fold paper or cloth right around it until it is covered. A present in shiny paper on the kitchen table; a scarf wrapped twice round your neck; chips wrapped in newspaper.
You wrap something IN paper and you wrap paper AROUND something — both are right, running in opposite directions. Wrap up leads two lives: put warm clothes on ('wrap up warm') and finish a thing off ('let us wrap up the meeting'), which is where a film set gets 'that's a wrap'. A wrap is food as well, chicken and salad rolled inside a flat bread, and the shelf beside it holds wrapping paper, bubble wrap, shrink-wrap and cling film. On a screen, text wraps when it runs onto the next line by itself. 'Wrapped up in' a person or a project means so absorbed that you notice nothing else.
1verbwrapTo cover something by folding paper or cloth around it.~75%
“She wrapped the vase in three layers of newspaper.”
2verbwindTo wind something round a thing or a person.~13%
“He wrapped his arms around her and said nothing.”
3nounsoftA soft flat bread rolled around a filling.~12%
“I ate a chicken wrap at my desk.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 16 sentences found in the wild and placed 8 of them on a sense (8 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Middle English wrappen meant to wrap or fold, and past that point the trail goes cold: nobody knows where English got the word. It may belong to the Proto-Indo-European root *werp-, *werb-, 'to turn, twist, bend', which would make it a distant relation of envelop and develop. Similar words sit in Danish and Middle Low German — close enough to be suspicious, not close enough to settle it.
Proto-Indo-European
*werp-
Middle English
wrappen — to wrap, fold
English, today
wrap
Built from
From Middle English wrappen (“to wrap, fold”), of unknown origin. Perhaps related to frr wrappe (“to press into; stop up”), dialectal Danish vrappe (“to stuff, cram”), Middle Low German rincworpen (“to envelop, wrap”), Middle Low German wrempen (“to wrinkle, scrunch the face”), all perhaps tied to Proto-Indo-European werp-, werb- (“to turn, twist, bend”). Compare also similar-sounding and similar-meaning Middle English wlappen (“to wrap, lap, envelop, fold”), Middle Dutch lappen (“to wrap up”), roa-oit goluppare (“to wrap”) (from Germanic). a doublet of lap#Etymology_2; related to envelop, develop. Also compare Latin verber (“whip, lash”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA