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sup

verbnounverbinterjectionadjectivenounnounnounnounattested in dialogue

  • //sʌp//
  • //sup//

To sip; to take a small amount of food or drink into the mouth, especially with a spoon.

verb

  1. 1

    To sip; to take a small amount of food or drink into the mouth, especially with a spoon.

    There I'll sup / Balm and nectar in my cup.

    We stood upon the forehead of the hills, / And lifted up our hearts in prayer; / And as we halted, reverent, / Meseemed that Nature o’er us bent, / That she did bid us sup / From bread she gave and from her cup.

    And as she supped her tea she smiled discreetly at him over the brim.

    On market days the farmers would come in before going home - Tysons and Lindsays and Birketts and Longmires and Boows and Dawsons - and their dogs would lie in heaps on the flags while they themselves supped Gerald's ale.

Etymology

Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *sew-? Proto-Indo-European *sewH- Proto-Indo-European *peh₃- Proto-Indo-European *su(H)ph₃néh₂-der.? Proto-Germanic *suppōną Proto-Germanic *sūpaną Proto-West Germanic *sūpan Old English sūpan Middle English soupen English sup The verb is from Middle English soupen, from Old English sūpan (“to sip, drink, taste”), from Proto-Germanic *sūpaną (compare Dutch zuipen (“to drink, tipple, booze”), German saufen (“to drink, booze”), Swedish supa (“to drink, swallow”)), from Proto-Indo-European *sub-, compare Sanskrit सूप (sū́pa, “soup, broth”), from *sewe (“to take liquid”). More at suck. The noun is from the verb. There is no evidence of continuity with Old English supa. Compare Middle English soupe, from Old English sūpe, which has the same meaning as Middle English sope (“a mouthful or small amount of drink”), from Old English sopa, whence sop.

noun

  1. 1

    A sip; a small amount, of food or drink, water or rain.

    Not a sup will I swallow, nor a bit will I bite, till Burd Ellen is set free.

    Is it stoppin' there you'd be till every sup of the say's dhrained out on us to beyant the King Pharaoh's Islands?

    “Then, who,” the sick man meekly said, / “Shall heal the sick and hide the dead?— / “Snatch the despairer’s poisoned cup; / Clothe shame, and give the outcast sup?⁠— / “Lighten, if only by a hair, / The load of human pain and care?”

    We’re sisters in a sort and I’ll take Louie home with me and give her sup and shelter.

verb

  1. 1

    To eat supper.

    ...I propose we should have up the cold pie, and let him sup.

    I pray you, be seated and sup how you please. You will, I trust, excuse me that I do not join you; but I have dined already, and I do not sup.

Etymology

Etymology tree Anglo-Norman superbor. Middle English soupen English sup From Middle English soupen, suppen, Anglo-Norman super, from supe, soupe. More at soup.

interjection

  1. 1

    slangwhat's up (either as a greeting or actual question)

    — Sup? — Not much.

Etymology

Procopic form of what's up (“how are you doing?”)

adjective

  1. 1

    Being or relating to the squark that is the superpartner of an up quark.

Etymology

From s- + up.

noun

  1. 1

    informalSuperintendent.

    They had put in the stretch-out and they were laying people off and there was talk of a union. "Let's have a union." "Mr. Shaw won't stand for it. The sup won't stand for it."

    Cpl. Perez, the radio sup said, "Everything checks out OK, Sarge. We're up and working."

    But here comes the deputy vehicle, cruising right up to the shelter on the bike path. The sup is a retired county sheriff's deputy.

Etymology

First syllable of superintendent.

noun

  1. 1

    Supremum, upper limit.

    Values for the sup W statistic in excess of the 5 percent critical value (2.75 for booms and 2.77 for slumps) indicate rejection of the null hypothesis of no change in the dureation of booms and slumps in real commodity prices.

    For a wide class of connected open sets U, not necessarily simply connected, one proves the existence of a harmonic function on U having given boundary value (satisfying suitable integrability conditions) by taking the sup of the subharmonic functions having this boundary value.

Etymology

First syllable of superior.

noun

  1. 1

    Supplement.

Etymology

Clipping of supplement.

noun

  1. 1

    A supervision.

Etymology

First syllable of supervision.

Forms

plural
sups
past tense
supped
past participle
supped
present participle
supping
third person singular
sups
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).