drip

• IPA^(key): /dɹɪp/
• Rhymes: -ɪp

From Middle English drippen, druppen, from Old English dryppan, from Proto-Germanic *drupjaną (“to fall in drops, drip”), from Proto-Germanic *drupô (“drop”). Akin to West Frisian drippe (“to drip”), Dutch druipen, druppelen (“to drip”), German Low German drüppen (“to drip”), German tropfen, tröpfeln (“to drip”), Norwegian Bokmål dryppe, Norwegian Nynorsk drypa (“to drip”).

drip (third-person singular simple present drips, present participle dripping, simple past and past participle dripped)

1. (intransitive) To fall one drop at a time.

   Listening to the tap next door drip all night drove me mad!

2. (intransitive) To leak slowly.

   Does the sink drip, or have I just spilt water over the floor?

3. (transitive) To let fall in drops.

   After putting oil on the side of the salad, the chef should drip a little vinegar in the oil.

   My broken pen dripped ink onto the table.

   • Jonathan Swift

     Which from the thatch drips fast a shower of rain.

   • 1913, Joseph C. Lincoln, chapter 8, in Mr. Pratt's Patients:

     Philander went into the next room […] and came back with a salt mackerel that dripped brine like a rainstorm. Then he put the coffee pot on the stove and rummaged out a loaf of dry bread and some hardtack.

4. (intransitive, usually with with) To have a superabundance of valuable things.

   The Old Hall simply drips with masterpieces of the Flemish painters.

   The duchess was dripping with jewels.

5. (intransitive, of the weather) To rain lightly.

   The weather isn't so bad. I mean, it's dripping, but you're not going to get so wet.

6. (intransitive) To be wet, to be soaked.

• bedrip
• dripper
• dripple

From Middle English drippe, from the verb (see above). Compare West Frisian drip (“drip”), Dutch drup (“drip”), Danish dryp (“drip”).

Water dripping from the end of a faucet.

drip (plural drips)

1. A drop of a liquid.

   I put a drip of vanilla extract in my hot cocoa.

2. A falling or letting fall in drops; act of dripping.
   • Byron

     the light drip of the suspended oar

3. (medicine) An apparatus that slowly releases a liquid, especially one that intravenously releases drugs into a patient's bloodstream.

   He's not doing so well. The doctors have put him on a drip.

4. (colloquial) A limp, ineffectual, or uninteresting person.

   He couldn't even summon up the courage to ask her name... what a drip!

5. (architecture) That part of a cornice, sill course, or other horizontal member, which projects beyond the rest, and has a section designed to throw off rainwater.

• drip irrigation

Acronym.

drip

1. (finance) A dividend reinvestment program; a type of financial investing.