Other forms: yaping
To yap is to bark in short shrill bursts. A yapping dog, yap at strangers, stop yapping.
It is what small dogs do, and the word carries the irritation with it — nobody describes a bark they like as a yap. Applied to people it means to talk on and on about nothing, and is dismissive: yapping away. Note yappy, used of a dog's temperament; and that yap is imitative, from the same family as yelp and yowl, none of which were borrowed from anywhere.
1verbyapTo bark in short shrill bursts.
“The little dog next door yaps at every car that passes.”
2verbtalkTo talk on and on about nothing.
“He kept yapping on about football all through dinner.”
yap is a shrill bark.
The word is imitative, first recorded in the sixteenth century, related to dialect yaup and to yelp. English builds animal-noise words this way and almost never takes them from other languages.
Built from
Probably of imitative of the sound origin. Alternatively, from dialectal yap, yaup, yalp (“to yap, yelp”). More at yelp.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire