chop

The interrupting verb wants a particle: you chop in, or chop out. The sense is old. In 1550, Hugh Latimer, in a sermon before King Edward, complained of a man who broke into his preaching, "even suddenly chopping in." The verb still carries the abruptness of a blow cutting across someone else's speech.

The grabbing sense lives in the construction chop at, a sudden snap toward something. Roger L'Estrange's fable of 1692 turns it into a moral: "Out of a Greediness to get both, he Chops at the Shadow, and Loses the Substance." Use it of a quick, often failed snatch. The at marks the attempt, not the catch.

A separate word from the cutting chop. It comes from Middle English choppe, "jaw," related to cheppe and chap, and may be linked to the cutting verb only far back. It is chiefly plural: an animal's chops are its jaws. The image carries over to the jaw of a vise and to the chops of a harbor mouth.

A baseball verb for a downward swing that drives the ball into the ground so that it rebounds high. While the ball hangs in the air, the fielder may run out of time to make the play. That is why a chopped ball so often turns into an infield single, and why some batters chop deliberately on fast or hard ground.

Beyond the tied hand of the poker noun, players can also chop by agreement. The last players in a tournament may divide the prize money and stop rather than play it out. The object is the money at stake, as in chop the pot or chop the prize pool, and the players themselves are the subject.

Poker's word for a tie at showdown. When two or more players hold hands of identical rank, such as two ace-high straights, the pot is split equally instead of going to one winner. Players say the pot "was a chop" or speak of a three-way chop. The action itself is the matching verb: to chop the pot is what a chop produces.

A programmer's verb from Perl, where chop removes the last character of a string whatever that character is, whether a letter, a digit or a newline. That indiscriminateness is the thing to remember. Operations that trim only trailing whitespace or line endings are safer when the final character might be real data.

The stamp becomes a guarantee here. A merchant's chop on goods vouched for their grade, and the finest goods bore the first chop. The phrase "silk of the first chop" therefore means silk of the highest quality, ranked by the mark it carries.

The jaw image is applied here to a coastline. The two points of land at a harbor or river mouth are its chops, as though the channel were a mouth opening onto the sea. The word survives most visibly in paired place names, East Chop and West Chop, which mark the two sides.

A sailor's word for wind that will not settle: the wind chops about, swinging from one quarter to another. Despite the spelling, it is probably not the cutting chop. Its origin, though uncertain, is shared with the bartering verb, perhaps through chap, "cheap," which compares with Dutch kopen, "to buy." Chop about is the natural phrasing.

Crude slang, used transitively and mostly in boastful talk among friends. A line like "what's the oldest ting he can chop?" catches the tone exactly. It is vulgar enough to give offense, and it is safest to understand when you hear it rather than to use it.

Agricultural shows in Australia and New Zealand have their own sporting event, the woodchopping race, known simply as the chop. The Examiner of Launceston reported in 1924 that the man who "won the chop at the show" cut through his block in 34 seconds. The clock against the block is the whole contest, and the winner is the one who gets through first.

British drug slang for cocaine, named from the way the powder is chopped into lines before use. The same habit lies behind the verb for cutting lines. It usually behaves as a mass noun, so people buy chop or find some chop. Treat it as street register: it belongs in reported speech and fiction, not in neutral prose.

The working end of the cocaine vocabulary, usually done with a razor blade or a card. With the particle out, the verb names the finished result (he chopped out a fat line). Plain chop names the cutting itself. It is drug slang through and through, and it shares its story with the British slang noun.

Multicultural London English slang for a blade carried as a weapon. It belongs to a crowded set of words for the same thing: chete, jook, ching, ying, rambo, pokey. It appears in lyrics such as SH's "Intro" (2025), which talks of wielding one. Outside that register a listener will hear the kitchen or the axe instead.

A clipped form of chopper, which makes it a different word from the cutting chop altogether. It is informal, and like any travel verb it takes a direction: chop back to base, chop out to a rig, chop in. The subject can be the pilot or the passengers being carried.

A borrowing from Hindi chāp, "stamp," reinforced in the Malay world by the related Malay cap. It belongs to the colloquial English of India, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, where an official form may need a chop before anyone will accept it. Readers from elsewhere will likely be puzzled by it, so stamp or seal is the safe gloss.

Here the word moves from the mark to the tool that makes it, a step taken colloquially in Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei. One word then covers both the carved seal and its impression, much as stamp does. Context decides whether someone is holding a chop or looking at one.