chips

Pluralchips

1. 1
   noun

   Plural of chip.

   The workshop floor was covered in wood chips by the end of the day.

   Modern phones pack several chips onto a single circuit board.

   Note

   A regular plural that reaches across the whole range of the singular: wood chips on a workshop floor, chips counted out as tokens instead of cash, chips mounted on a circuit board. In dated slang, chips were sovereigns, the gold coins. Out of context the word can point several ways, so the surrounding nouns (wood, cash, circuit) usually settle which chips are meant.

2. 2
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present of chip.

   The sculptor chips small fragments from the marble block with each careful strike.

   Frost chips away at the stone facade over many winters.

   Note

   The -s form a singular subject takes: she chips, the frost chips, it chips. It carries every use of the verb, with or without an object. A sculptor chips marble, a cheap glaze chips easily, and a golfer chips the ball onto the green. In dialect it can also mean working with a chisel. The same spelling serves the plural noun, so only the sentence shows which one is meant.

3. 3
   nounslang

   A carpenter, used as a familiar or slang nickname for the tradesman who works with wood.

   Down at the yard, the chips fashioned a new mast from seasoned oak.

   When the porch sagged badly, the foreman sent the chips over to shore it up.

   Similarcarpenter, joiner, woodworker

   Note

   Sailors used this word for the ship's carpenter, and it is singular despite its -s: The Atlantic Monthly in 1929 has a man going to sea "as a 'chips.'" In Herman Melville's Omoo (1847), the carpenter and the cooper are Chips and Bungs, capitalized and used as names. The word belongs to shipboard speech, and outside nautical or historical writing it is likely to puzzle a reader.

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