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OneKitly

laptop

nounadjectiveverbcommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈlæp.tɒp//
  • United States//ˈlæp.tɑp//

A laptop computer.

noun

  1. 1

    A laptop computer.

    He was playing a video game on his laptop.

    Over time, the difference in size between laptops and notebooks became a matter of no more than an inch or two in length and width, and a fraction of an inch in thickness.

    Think of banking today and the image is of grey-suited men in towering skyscrapers. Its future, however, is being shaped in converted warehouses and funky offices in San Francisco, New York and London, where bright young things in jeans and T-shirts huddle around laptops, sipping lattes or munching on free food.

Etymology

From lap (“upper legs of a seated person”) + top, modeled after desktop.

adjective

  1. 1

    Designed for use on a lap.

    At NCC, however, laptop portables such as the Gavilan were stealing the show, and when Miyashita returned to japan, his list of possible projects included a proposal for a portable computer.

    Otherwise, the keyboard feel and layout are good for a laptop machine but, as with most portables, I wouldn’t want to use the T1000 to write the entire great American novel—just a chapter or two at a time.

    Nestled snugly into a cattle-class seat aboard a 737, you drop your tray table and open your laptop PC.

verb

  1. 1

    To use a laptop computer.

Forms

plural
laptops
past tense
laptoped
past participle
laptoped
present participle
laptoping
third person singular
laptops
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).