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syrup

nounverbcommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈsɪ.ɹəp//
  • United States//ˈsɪɹ.əp//
  • United States//ˈsɝ.əp//
  • Ireland//ˈsɪ.ɹəp//
  • //ˈsɪ.ɹəp//

Any thick liquid that has a high sugar content and which is added to or poured over food as a flavoring.

noun

  1. 1

    Any thick liquid that has a high sugar content and which is added to or poured over food as a flavoring.

    maple syrup

    pancake syrup

    peaches in syrup

    In Somerset, for example, the local farmers would often boil down the beet juice to create a honey tender, a viscous syrup that sweetened the harvest porridge.

  2. 2

    Any viscous liquid.

    cough syrup

    rose syrup

  3. 3

    figurativeAnything overly sweet or sentimental.

    Eventually, he or his staunch public tired of his easy-listening syrup, so Price recorded gospel for the Myrrh label before semi-retiring to his Golden Cross Ranch in Texas.

  4. 4

    slangA wig.

Etymology

From Middle English sirup, from Old French sirop, from Medieval Latin siruppus, syrupus, from Arabic شَرَاب (šarāb, “a drink, beverage, wine, coffee, syrup”), from شَرِبَ (šariba, “to drink”). Doublet of sirop. Related to sorbet, sherbet, sharbat. Compare French sirop, Italian siroppo, sciroppo, Spanish jarabe, jarope, Portuguese xarope, and Dutch siroop and stroop. The first known use of the spelling sirup was in the 14th century.

verb

  1. 1

    To convert or process into syrup.

  2. 2

    To add syrup to.

  3. 3

    To sabotage (a vehicle) by pouring syrup into the gas tank.

Forms

plural
syrups
past tense
syruped
past participle
syruped
present participle
syruping
third person singular
syrups
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).