leap
Noun pluralleaps
Pluralleaps
- 1To jump, especially with force or across a distance.
Dancers leap across the floor in perfect unison.
He leaped from the dock into the cold lake.
Similarjump, spring, bound, vault, hop
Note
The core verb that the rest of the family grows from: Middle English lepen, from Old English hlēapan. Lope, gallop, elope and loop descend from the same Germanic source. In the past tense, leaped and leapt stand side by side. Lept survives only as an archaic spelling, and an obsolete past form, lope, has the same shape as its doublet.
- 2An act of jumping, propelling the body off the ground.
The gymnast's leap drew applause from the crowd.
A single leap carried the deer over the stream.
Similarjump, bound, spring, vault
Note
The noun of the act keeps the verb's sense of sudden motion, and it turns figurative easily. Roger L'Estrange in 1692 warned against leaps from one extreme to another. Henry Sweet's Handbook of Phonetics (1877) says tones change either by leaps or by glides, setting an abrupt jump against smooth change.
- 3A significant advance or step forward in progress or development.
The discovery marked a remarkable leap in our understanding of genetics.
Her promotion was a major leap forward in her career.
Similaradvance, jump, breakthrough, step, stride
Oppositesetback, regression
Note
The figurative advance with a famous line behind it: Neil Armstrong's "one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind" (1969) sets step against leap, the modest against the momentous. Leap forward is its familiar phrase. The noun can also measure plain growth, as in consumption rising by year-on-year leaps.
- 4To get past something by jumping over it.
The runner leaped the final hurdle and crossed the line.
Mountain goats leap gaps that would stop most other animals.
Similarclear, jump, vault, hurdle
Note
Here the obstacle becomes the direct object: you leap a wall or a ditch rather than leap over it. Tennyson stretches the construction in 1850, wishing he could leap the grades of life and light. Keep it apart from the causative use, where the object is the one doing the jumping, as when a rider leaps a horse across a ditch.
- 5The distance covered in a single jump.
The athlete's record leap stunned the judges.
A leap of three meters cleared the entire sandpit.
Similarjump
- 6To make someone or something jump.
Experienced jockeys leap their mounts over towering fences.
He wanted to leap the dog across the gap to test its nerve.
Similarjump
- 7A large jump in reasoning, often one the available facts don't actually support.
Concluding sabotage from a single error is a leap unsupported by evidence.
Her argument took a leap that the data simply couldn't justify.
Note
Where the forward leap praises progress, this one usually doubts it: a leap in reasoning skips steps that evidence should have supplied. Its typical frame is evaluative, as in "it's quite a leap to claim that…". Calling an argument a leap is therefore already a mild objection, not a neutral description.
- 8Of a year or month, containing an extra day or period inserted to keep the calendar aligned with the astronomical year.
A leap year adds February 29 to realign the calendar with Earth's orbit.
The leap month in lunisolar calendars keeps the months synced with the seasons.
Similarintercalary
Oppositecommon
Note
The calendar adjective works only before a noun and cannot be compared: you can say a leap year or a leap month, but never a very leap year. Intercalary and bissextile are its learned equivalents. In everyday English the compound leap year is where most speakers meet it.
- 9A move from one musical note to another across an interval, especially a wide one that skips over the notes in between.
The melody opens with a dramatic leap of an octave.
Her voice handled the upward leap without any strain.
Similarjump
Oppositestep
Note
Musicians set the leap against the step. Moving to a neighboring note is stepwise motion, while a leap jumps an interval and passes over the notes between. The wider the interval, the more clearly it counts as a leap, and the more it stands out in a melody's line.
- 10A small cataract or waterfall over which fish attempt to jump on their way upstream; a salmon ladder.
Each autumn the salmon mass below the leap, hurling themselves upward against the falling water.
A fish pass was installed beside the old leap to ease the upstream migration.
Note
A place on a river named for what the fish do there: the fall the salmon try to jump. The Imperial Gazetteer of Scotland (1868) pairs it with linn, "a linn or leap". The New Sporting Magazine of 1837 describes a boat swinging toward "the fall of the leap" and the rapids, a hazard to boats as well as fish.
- 11A group of leopards considered together as a unit.
A leap of leopards moved silently across the ridge at dusk.
Naturalists counted a leap of seven animals patrolling the valley.
Note
One of the fanciful group names English keeps for animals, and it travels in company. Writers set a leap of leopards beside a pride of lions, a crash of rhinos or an unkindness of ravens, as Sandra Evans does in This Is Not a Werewolf Story (2017). Part of its charm is the sound: leap and leopard begin alike.
- 12A fault; a break or dislocation in a vein or rock layer encountered in mining.
Surveyors mapped a leap that displaced the ore vein by nearly a meter.
The seam vanished where a leap had shifted the surrounding rock.
Similarfault, dislocation
Note
A miner's word for the break that interrupts a vein. Where the rock has shifted along a fault, the seam being followed seems to leap to a new position, and the word names that dislocation. Outside the trade the ordinary term is fault; leap belongs to the language of mining.
- 13The act of copulating with or covering a female animal.
The herdsman noted every leap in his ledger to track the breeding season.
After the leap, the mare was turned out with the rest of the herd.
Similarcovering, mounting, service
Note
The noun of the farmyard verb, and it can be counted. The British Farmer's Magazine of 1865 weighs how many bullings a cow should receive and judges that one good leap is better than more. It sits alongside bulling in breeders' prose and shares its verb's breeding vocabulary.
- 14Of a male animal, to copulate with or cover a female beast.
The keeper allowed the bull to leap the cow before winter set in.
Each spring the boar would leap several sows in the yard.
Note
An archaic farmyard verb, used of a male animal mounting a female. It belongs to older breeding talk rather than modern speech, so in present-day writing it reads as period color. The noun for a single covering carries the same meaning and is the form farming prose keeps.
- 15To copulate with a person.
The satire accused the courtier of trying to leap every lady at the ball.
go leap her, and engender young devilings
1616, John Fletcher, Philip MassingerNote
The breeding verb turned on people, and coarse in tone: in a play by John Fletcher, Philip Massinger and Nathan Field, first performed 1616–1619, a character is told to "go leap her, and engender young devilings." The sense is archaic now. Met in older drama, it signals crude mockery rather than tenderness, and it is not a word to revive casually.
- 16A wickerwork fish trap made from woven twigs, also known as a weely.
Each evening the fisherman lowered a leap into the current and checked it at dawn.
The old leap, woven from willow, still held a few trout.
Similartrap
Note
A different word that happens to share the spelling. This one comes from Old English lēap, "basket", with a cognate in Icelandic laupur, and it has nothing to do with jumping. The trap is a woven basket set in the water, which is why it can also be called a weely. The same basket word lies behind the half-bushel measure.
- 17A unit of measure equal to half a bushel.
The farmer set aside a leap of seed grain for the spring planting.
Each tenant owed the manor a leap of wheat at harvest.
Note
A measure that began as a container. This is the old basket word, from a Germanic root meaning "container, basket", fixed as a quantity of half a bushel. Like the fish trap, it is unrelated to the verb of jumping and belongs to the vocabulary of grain and dry goods.
Showing meanings only.
Practice
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Origins
From Middle English lepen, from Old English hlēapan, from Proto-Germanic *hlaupaną. It is a doublet of lope, elope, and gallop, and is cognate with words such as Dutch lopen and German laufen ("to run"), tracing back to Proto-Indo-European *klewb- ("to spring, stumble").
From Middle English lep, from Old English lēap ("basket"), from Proto-Germanic *laupaz ("container, basket"), cognate with Icelandic laupur ("basket").