/ˈdɹuːp/
OriginInherited from Middle English droupen, from Old Norse drúpa (“to droop”), from Proto-Germanic *drūpaną, *drupōną (“to hang down, drip, drop”), from Proto-Indo-European *dʰrewb- (“to drip, drop”). Doublet of drip and drop.
- intransitiveTo hang downward; to sag.
“On the brown harvest tree / Droops the red cherry.”
“Long before Shap platform showed up around a corner and the two arms on the gradient post drooped in both directions at once, Duchess of Buccleuch's amiable throbbing purr at the stack [funnel, chimne”
“a. 1992, quote attributed to Sylvester Stallone
I'm not handsome in the classical sense. The eyes droop, the mouth is crooked, the teeth aren't straight, the voice sounds like a Mafioso pallbearer, bu”
- intransitiveTo slowly become limp; to bend gradually.
“Good things of day begin to droop and drowse; / While night’s black agents to their preys do rouse.”
“The Grapes that on it hung were black, and all / The Vines supported and from drooping staid / With silver Props, that down they could not fall […]”
“Long after his cigar burnt bitter, he sat with eyes fixed on the blaze. When the flames at last began to flicker and subside, his lids fluttered, then drooped; but he had lost all reckoning of time wh”
- intransitiveTo lose all energy, enthusiasm or happiness; to flag.
“But wherefore do you droop? why look you sad?”
“Amidst the peaceful Triumphs of his Reign, / What wonder if the kindly beams he shed / Reviv’d the drooping Arts again […]”
“I saw him accidentally once or twice about 10 Days before he died, and observed he began very much to Droop and Languish […]”
- transitiveTo allow to droop or sink.
“[…] pithless arms, like to a wither’d vine / That droops his sapless branches to the ground;”
“1892, Arthur Christopher Benson, “Knapweed” in Le Cahier Jaune: Poems, Eton: privately printed, p. 62,
Down in the mire he droops his head;
Forgotten, not forgiven.”
- figuratively, intransitiveTo proceed downward, or toward a close; to decline.
“[…] let us forth, / I never from thy side henceforth to stray, / Wherere our days work lies, though now enjoind / Laborious, till day droop […]”
“[…] and now when day / Droop’d, and the chapel tinkled, mixt with those / Six hundred maidens clad in purest white […]”
“Share prices are drooping.”
- Something which is limp or sagging.
- A condition or posture of drooping.
“He walked with a discouraged droop.”
- A hinged portion of the leading edge of an aeroplane's wing, which swivels downward to increase lift during takeoff and landing.
- archaicDrooping; adroop.
“But when the melancholy fit shall fall / Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud, / That fosters the droop-headed flowers all. / And hides the green hill in an April shroud :”
Formsdroops(present, singular, third-person) · drooping(participle, present) · drooped(participle, past) · drooped(past) · droops(plural) · more droop(comparative) · most droop(superlative)