Rap is defined as to hit quickly and sharply, or to speak or chant lyrics to a song with a reoccurring beat.
(verb)The definition of a rap is a light knock, tapping sound or criticism, or a style of music where lyrics are spoken or chanted with reoccurring musical beats.
(noun)See rap in Webster's New World College Dictionary
transitive verb rapped, rapping
Origin: ME rappen, prob. of echoic orig.
intransitive verb
noun
noun
Origin: < ?
See rap in American Heritage Dictionary 4
verb rapped rapped, rap·ping, raps verb, transitive
Origin:
Origin: Middle English rappen
Origin: , possibly of imitative origin
.noun
Origin:
Origin: From obsolete rap, 18th-century Irish counterfeit halfpenny
Origin: , from Irish Gaelic
Origin: , alteration (possibly influenced by rap, piece, bit)
Origin: of ropaire, cutthroat; see rapparee
.noun
Origin:
Origin: Possibly from rap1
. Our Living Language The culture of hip-hop has been the source of dozens of words and expressions in American English, of which rap is one of the most familiar. The word is probably a development ultimately of rap meaning “to hit.” It shows up in the early 1900s in the extended meaning “to express orally,” as used by so notable a figure as Winston Churchill in 1933. Over the next few decades it came to mean “to discuss or debate informally,” a meaning that was well established in the African-American community by the late 1960s. A decade later the word was applied to an evolving style of music characterized by, among other things, beat-driven rhymes of an often improvisatory nature. The slang that is integral to the lyrics of rap continues to be a source of borrowings into colloquial American English; recent examples include chill, meaning “to calm down,” and dis, meaning “to show disrespect to.” These are but the latest examples in a long series of such borrowings from Black English stretching back a century or more, many of them directly from popular music lyrics or from musicians' lingo.Learn more about rap
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