/ˈsæpi/
OriginFrom Middle English sappy, sapy, from Old English sæpiġ (“full of sap, succulent”), equivalent to sap + -y. Cognate with West Frisian sappig (“juicy”), Dutch sappig (“juicy, succulent”), Middle High German saffic, seffec ("juicy, succulent"; > German saftig), Danish saftig (“juicy”), Swedish saftig (“juicy”). Doublet of zaftig.
- USExcessively sweet, emotional, nostalgic; cheesy; mushy. (British equivalent: soppy)
“He was a good deal of a character, and much better company than the sappy literature he was selling.”
“To himself, already beginning to resent the new employer as all that morning he had been resenting the old one, Dr. Planish groaned, “He’s getting saintly on me! A careerist in holiness! I'll never be”
“It was a sappy love song, but it reminded them of their first dance.”
- Having (a particularly large amount of) sap.
“‘Torches are made to light, jewels to wear,
Dainties to taste, fresh beauty for the use,
Herbs for their smell, and sappy plants to bear:
Things growing to themselves are growth’s abuse:
Seeds spring ”
“But these, tho’ fed with careful dirt,
Are neither green nor sappy;
Half-conscious of the garden-squirt,
The spindlings look unhappy,”
“The sappy green twig-tips of the season’s growth would not, she thought, be appreciably woodier on the day she became a wife, so near was the time; the tints of the foliage would hardly have changed.”
- obsoleteJuicy.
“1590, Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Book Two, Canto XII, Stanza 56, edited by Erik Gray, Hackett, 2006, p. 214,
In her left hand a Cup of gold she held,
And with her right the riper fruit did rea”
“1693, François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Book III, (1546), translated by Thomas Urquhart, Chapter 18,
The words of the third article are: She will suck me at my best end. Why not? That pleas”
“Did first the Rigour of their Kind expell,
And suppled into softness as they fell;
Then swell’d, and swelling, by degrees grew warm;
And took the Rudiments of human Form.
Imperfect Shapes: in Marble s”
- obsoleteSpongy; Having spaces in which large quantities of sap can flow.
“In flush-framing if is observable, that the failure of all timber in old buildings has commenced much sooner than they otherwise would have done, owing to the sappy wood being at the corners of the pr”
“...wood is of a soft spungy nature ; sappy, and alluring to the worm.”
“I can state some of them here on a. book ; I have the particulars at home, but I can give you some of them here ; this is the Twelfth street pier, number fifty-four [reading from memorandum], 12x12 pi”
- obsoleteMusty; tainted; rancid.
“sappie or unsavourie flesh”
“Sapy [denotes] a moisture contracted on the outward surface of meats, which is the first stage of dissolution.”
“Some housekeepers prepare their hung beef in this manner: Take the navel piece, and hang it up in your cellar as long as it will keep good, and til it begins to be a little sappy.”
Formssappier(comparative) · sappiest(superlative) · more sappy(comparative) · most sappy(superlative) · sapy(alternative)