chip

The hot fried potato of fish and chips, the traditional British dish. This is the usual word in the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, but it survives only as an archaism in Canada, and North Americans mostly say fries or French fries. It is normally plural. In the US, chips means the thin, crisp snack, which British and Irish speakers call crisps.

A measure of next to nothing that sits most naturally after not. In R M Ballantyne's The Coral Island (1858), one captain is "not a chip better than the one we're with now." Like whit and jot, it names the smallest possible amount so that the sentence can deny there is even that much difference.

The golfer's chip is mostly a roll. The ball makes a short, low carry through the air and then runs the rest of the way to the hole. Because it is played from around the green, it sits between a longer approach and the putt that usually follows. Golfers also use the verb for playing it.

Here the object is the ball, and the verb takes a direction as easily as a target. In Paul Doyle's 2014 report of Southampton putting eight past Sunderland, Tadic waits for Cork's run to the back post before chipping the ball across. When the object is a person instead, as in chipping the goalkeeper, the verb names the beaten player rather than the stroke.

One word covers several sports, and the shots barely resemble one another. In soccer a chip lifts the ball steeply, usually over a goalkeeper who has come off his line. Because the shot is slow, it can be read and stopped. In 2011 BBC Sport reported that Oxlade-Chamberlain's "attempted chip" for Arsenal was "well blocked" by the goalkeeper Costanzo.

A billiards verb that often describes a side effect rather than the main aim. In potting the black, a player may also chip the red off the side cushion. Because the contact is oblique, the ball moves only a short way. The word suits small, glancing movements of a ball, not firm strikes.

Tennis turns the soccer shot upside down. The racket comes down through the ball and slices it, instead of lifting it high. The shot is light and usually played near the net. In tennis, then, a chip suggests touch and placement rather than height or pace.

The word stretches here beyond pure circuitry. Papazoglou and Parthasarathy's Bionanotechnology (2007) describes a drug delivery microchip made of gold-painted silicon, with 34 nano-sized wells, pictured beside a dime. The scale and flatness of the integrated circuit carry over. What sits on the substrate, though, can be wells, channels or a whole micro chemical laboratory.

The verb comes from electronics, not from the chisel. To chip a car is to alter the chip that runs its engine management, usually for more power. It takes the vehicle or the engine as its object, as in chipping a hatchback or a diesel. A chipped engine is one that has been modified in this way, not one that has been damaged.

On the billiard table, a chip is a matter of weight rather than angle. The cue ball is struck so softly that the object ball only just reaches the pocket, and the cue ball stays out. Too much force pockets both balls, and too little leaves the object ball short. The whole shot is judged on that narrow margin.

Curling's chip is about angle. Instead of meeting a rock squarely, the takeout catches it off-center, so the rock glances away. That oblique contact puts it closer to the glancing billiards verb than to the lofted soccer shot or the rolling golf one.

The medallion that marks time. In recovery groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous, chips show how long a member has abstained, with six months as one milestone. A chip in this sense is earned and kept rather than spent. That sets it apart from the gambling token, even though both are small, flat objects that stand for something.

The office collection is its natural home: everyone chips in £1 for George's leaving present. The sum follows the verb directly, with no preposition, as in chip in a pound or chip in a fiver. Without in, the verb drifts back toward breaking pieces off.

Card players usually say chip in: each player chips in before the deal, putting a stake into the pot. The verb takes no object, because the stake is understood. The same phrase also turns up away from the table, in the British sense of contributing.

British slang with a separate origin from the chips of wood and stone. Zadie Smith's NW (2012) catches its rhythm: "Lloyd, I'm gonna chip." "You just got here!" It takes no object; you simply chip, or gotta chip. It belongs to casual speech among friends, not to writing.

A northern New Zealand word for the small container that fruit is sold in, as in a chip of strawberries. Southern New Zealanders call the same thing a pottle, and in Britain and Australia it is a punnet. The word therefore changes even within a single country, and a shopper traveling south will hear a different name for the same box.

Money slang from the days of gold coinage, now dated. A reader may meet it in older talk of cash, where a chip is a sovereign. To a modern listener the word suggests the gambling token instead. Use it only to give speech a period flavor, never as a plain way of naming a coin.

The teasing verb takes a person, then about and the subject of the teasing. In Arthur Conan Doyle, a grieving man remembers that "she was always chipping me about my collars." In George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan (1923), a speaker says, "They chip me about giving that young judy the cross." The variant chip at works the same way.