Word.ws English Dictionary

aflap

aflap adjective: flapping.

Adjective

aflap (not comparable)

  1. Flapping.
    • and she / A vulture feasting with foul wings aflap1894, George Lansing Raymond, The Aztec God, Act 3, in The Aztec God and Other Dramas, New York: Putnam, 1908, p. 66
    • nodding her head firmly, headscarf aflap1984, Keri Hulme, The Bone People, Auckland: Spiral, published 1985, Part 3, Chapter 7, p. 292
  2. Filled (with something flapping).
    • They walked up Main Street, which was all aflap with American flags […]1908, Eugene Wood, Folks Back Home, New York: The McClure Company, page 46
    • Clothes-drying lofts, open frameworks on the flat roofs of houses, all aflap with clothes, sheets, kimono, reminded me of Canaletto’s pictures of Venetian life […]1962, James Kirkup, chapter 10, in These Horned Islands, New York: Macmillan, page 152
  3. (colloquial) Showing excessive excitement or anger.
    • “First he says we isn’t welcome, then he’s all aflap cause some of us is gone.”1977, Niel Hancock, Calix Stay, New York: Fawcett Popular Library, p. 93
    • […] people are barely over our givin’ that extra quota of cod to the French, now they’re all aflap about selling spawny caplin to the Japanese […]1994, Bernice Morgan, Waiting for Time, St. John’s, NL: Breakwater, Part 1, Chapter 4, p. 53
    Synonyms:
    in a flap

Examples of aflap in a sentence

  • […] a woman in a gaberdine comes staggering out from the roadside, hands aflap, shoeless but on the run.2013, Richard House, “The Hit”, in The Kills, London: Picador, page 806:
  • […] the buses bursting with cackling passengers three times over capacity and aflap with chickens.2003, Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin, London: Serpent’s Tail, published 2005, page 118:

Synonyms of aflap

Origin of aflap

From a- + flap.

Questions about aflap

What does aflap mean?
Aflap means flapping.
How do you use aflap in a sentence?
[…] a woman in a gaberdine comes staggering out from the roadside, hands aflap, shoeless but on the run.
What part of speech is aflap?
Aflap is an adjective.

Words near aflap in the dictionary

  1. aflame
  2. aflamed
  3. aflames
  4. aflaming
  5. Aflao
  6. aflap
  7. aflare
  8. aflash
  9. aflastatin
  10. aflat
  11. aflatoxicol

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: aflap (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “aflap.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/aflap. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.