mump
/mʌmp/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 1.30 in modern English
10
Scrabble Score
4
Letters
1
Syllables
3
Unique Chars
Meaning
verb
To nibble.
Example Sentences
- "Who mump their passion, and who, grimly smiling, Still thus address the fair with voice beguiling […]"
- "He mumps, and lowres, and hangs the lip […]"
- "Your ministerial directors blustered like tragic tyrants here; and then went mumping with a sore leg in America, canting, and whining, and complaining of faction, which represented them as friends to a revenue from the colonies."
- "The Christian also spurns the pinched and mumping sick-room attitude, and the lives of saints are full of a kind of callousness to diseased conditions of body which probably no other human records show."
- "It remained necessary to make a shift at bearing yourself like a man; not mumping, not moping."
Etymology
Perhaps borrowed through obsolete Dutch mompen (“to cheat, swindle, deceive”), according to Kroonen, a derivative of Proto-Germanic *mump- (“to stain”), perhaps from Proto-Indo-European *mm̥bʰ-neh₂- Also akin to German mimpfeln (“to mumble”), Icelandic mumpa (“to take into the mouth”). See also English mum. While Kroonen claims Ancient Greek μέμφομαι (mémphomai, “I blame, accuse”) and the Germanic forms are reconcilable and related, Beekes rejects this, stating that Germanic -p- cannot here correspond to Greek -φ- and that this etymological connection is not widely considered reliable.
Origin
Word Breakdown
- Root: *mump-, *membʰ-
Usage
Subject
Wiktionary places this term in Law.