Sip

//sɪp// name, noun, verb

name, noun, verb ·Moderate ·High school level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A small mouthful of drink
  2. 2
    Acronym of single-issue publication. abbreviation, acronym, alt-of
  3. 3
    a small drink wordnet
  4. 4
    An event at which people drink alcohol in small, usually sub-intoxicating amounts.

    "Earl is always a good time. His appearance at parties, whether it's a smart cocktail sip or a basement gig, is mandatory."

Verb
  1. 1
    To drink slowly, small mouthfuls at a time. transitive

    "He held out to me a bowl of steaming broth, that filled the room with a savour sweeter, ten thousand times, to me than every rose and lily of the world; yet would not let me drink it at a gulp, but made me sip it with a spoon like any baby."

  2. 2
    drink in sips wordnet
  3. 3
    To drink a small quantity. intransitive

    "[She] rais'd it to her mouth with sober grace; / Then, sipping, offered to the next in place."

  4. 4
    To taste the liquor of; to drink out of.

    "They skim the floods, and sip the purple flowers."

  5. 5
    Alternative form of seep. Scotland, US, alt-of, alternative, dated
Show 1 more definition
  1. 6
    To consume slowly. figuratively

    "Sales of lightbulbs which sip electricity, and whose increased cost in the shops is easily paid for over their lifetime, used to double every year; in 1990/1991, they leapt sevenfold."

Proper Noun
  1. 1
    Initialism of Session Initiation Protocol Internet, abbreviation, alt-of, initialism
  2. 2
    Initialism of Supplementary Ideographic Plane, the third plane (Plane 2) in Unicode, with 65,536 codepoints (from U+20000 through U+2FFFF), mainly used for less-common CJK characters. abbreviation, alt-of, initialism
  3. 3
    Initialism of System Integrity Protection. abbreviation, alt-of, initialism
  4. 4
    Initialism of Strengthening Institutions Program. US, abbreviation, alt-of, initialism

    "“The Budget does not include funding for the Strengthening Institutions Program (SIP). SIP is duplicative of other Title III and V program funding for institutional support activities."

Synonyms

All synonyms
nipbeveragebibbiteboozebumper

Example

More examples

"I had to sip the coffee because it was too hot."

Etymology

Inherited from Middle English sippen, of uncertain origin. Compare with Low German sippen (“to sip”). Possibly from a variant of Middle English suppen (“to drink, sip”) (see sup) or perhaps from Old English sipian, sypian (“to take in moisture, soak, macerate”), from Proto-Germanic *sipōną (“to drip, trickle”), from Proto-Indo-European *seyb- (“to pour out, trickle, leak out”). Compare also Old High German supfen (“to drink, sip”), from Proto-Germanic *sūpaną (“to sip, intake”).

Related phrases

latte-sippingpaint and sipsip and puffsip-and-seesip-and-see party

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.