tap

Meanings

1. 1
   verb

   To hit something gently and quickly.

   Someone tapped me on the shoulder from behind.

2. 2
   verb

   To make light, repeated hits on a surface.

   She tapped her fingers on the table while she waited.

3. 3
   verb

   To secretly listen to someone's phone calls.

   The police suspected that their phone line was being tapped.

4. 4
   verb

   To draw on a source to get something useful from it.

   The company is trying to tap a new market in Asia.

Appears in

Simplified etymology

Tap in the sense of a fitting comes from an Old English word for a cask stopper; because the stopper controlled liquid flow, the name passed to other flow-controlling fittings. On tap originally described drink in a cask ready to serve, while the sense of secretly intercepting communications arose in the 1860s from the idea of siphoning off information. Tap meaning “strike lightly” is an unrelated Middle English word, probably imitating the action through its sound.

The noun is derived from Middle English tappe (“hollow device for controlling the flow of liquid from a hole, cock, faucet, spigot; hole through which the liquid flows; the liquid which thus flows”), from Old English tæppa, from Proto-West Germanic *tappō, from Proto-Germanic *tappô (“a plug, tap; peg; tapering stick”), from Proto-Indo-European *deh₂p- (“to lose; to sacrifice”). Doublet of tapa. The verb is derived from Middle English tappen (“to obtain (liquid, chiefly liquor) from a tap; to obtain and sell (liquor)”), from Old English tæppian (“to provide (a container) with a stopper; to obt…

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External links

• Google Images
• Cambridge Dictionary
• Wiktionary