Word.ws English Dictionary

hap

/hæp/

hap noun: a person's lot (good or bad), luck, fortune, fate.

Noun (1)

hap (countable and uncountable, plural haps)

  1. (archaic, uncountable) A person's lot (good or bad), luck, fortune, fate.
  2. (archaic, countable) A stroke of good or bad luck, an occurrence or happening, especially an unexpected, random, chance, or fortuitous event.
    • Cursed be good haps, and cursed be they that build / Their hopes on haps, and do not make despair / For all these certain blows the surest shield.c. 1580s, Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, book 2
    • And whether art it were, or heedless hap, / As through the flowring forest rash she fled, / In her rude hairs sweet flowres themselves did lap / And flourishing fresh leaves and blossoms did enwrap.1590, Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, book 2, canto 3, verse 30
    Synonyms:
    hazard

Verb (1)

hap (third-person singular simple present haps, present participle happing, simple past and past participle happed)

  1. (archaic, intransitive, literary) To happen; to befall; to chance.
    • "But laudably, since thus it happed!" quoth one: Whereat, more witness and the case postponed. "Thus it happed not, since thus he did the deed,....1868-9, Robert Browning, “The Ring and the Book”, in Edward Berdoe, editor, The poetical works of Robert Browning, published 1889, page 17
    • "We must go there to retrieve it before the Krikkit robots find it, or who knows what may hap."1982, Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything, page 81
    Synonyms:
    come to pass, occur, transpire, bechance, befall, behap, belimp, betide, betime, beworth
  2. (archaic, literary, transitive) To happen to.
    • What meaneth June, to hap us every year.1891, Elizabeth Stoddard, “No Answer”, in Harper's magazine, page 55

Noun (2)

hap (plural haps)

  1. (archaic, in plural, slang) Happenings; events; goings-on.
    • Katie Griffin as Samantha Sparks: "Hey, Flint. I heard your extended (gasp) earlier. What's the haps?"
      Mark Edwards as Flint Lockwood: "The haps is -- you're not going to believe this, but dad asked me to make him an invention!"2018, Something Fishy (Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs: The Series)
    Synonyms:
    affairs

Noun (3)

hap (plural haps)

  1. (Pennsylvania, Scotland, UK, Western, archaic) A wrap, such as a quilt or a comforter. Also, a small or folded blanket placed on the end of a bed to keep feet warm.

Verb (2)

hap (third-person singular simple present haps, present participle happing, simple past and past participle happed)

  1. (archaic, dialectal) To wrap, clothe.
    • Bless thy pretty heart! The bairn’s sick. Come wi’ me, and I’ll hap thee up somewhere. If thou wert a bit cleaner I’d put thee in my own bed, for the Lord’s sake.1863, Charles Kingsley, The Water Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby
    • The surgeon happed her up carefully.1859, John Brown, Rab and his Friends

Noun (4)

hap (plural haps)

  1. (archaic) Any of the cichlid fishes of the tribe Haplochromini.

Noun (5) capitalized: HAP

HAP (countable and uncountable, plural HAPs)

  1. (abbreviation) Abbreviation of hospital-acquired pneumonia.
    Synonyms:
    NP
  2. (abbreviation, initialism) Initialism of hazardous air pollutant.
    • The purpose of this program is to reduce 75% of the cancer incidence resulting from area sources (defined as stationary sources which emit less than 10 tons of a single HAP or 25 tons of a combination of HAPs) of hazardous air pollutants in urban areas.1993, Frank T. Princiotta, Douglas G. McKinney, “Air Toxics: The Research Challenge of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments”, in Winston Chow, Katherine K. Connor, editors, Managing Hazardous Air...

hap meaning in Hindi, Tamil, Marathi and Urdu

hap in Hindi

एच. ए. पी, हैप

hap in Tamil

ஹேப்

hap in Marathi

हॅप

hap in Urdu

ایچ اے پی
More languagesFewer languages
hap in Bengali
হ্যাপ
hap in Malayalam
ഹാപ്പ്
hap in Kannada
ಹ್ಯಾಪ್
hap in Punjabi
ਐੱਚ. ਏ. ਪੀ, ਹੈਪ
hap in Gujarati
હેપ, એચએપી
hap in Odia
ହ୍ଯ଼ାପ୍

Examples of hap in a sentence

  • [I]t hath been many an honest man's hap to pass for the father of children he never begot […]1749, Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling:
  • The practice was, before firing a shot for the purpose of blasting, to give an order to hap the crane, that is, to cover it, in order to protect it from the effect of the shot.1899, “Bartonshill Coal Co. v. Beid, 1 Pat. Sc. App. 792, 793.”, in Robert Campbell, editor, Ruling cases, volume 19:

Synonyms of hap

15 more synonymsFewer synonyms

All synonyms of hap

Forms of hap

Noun
pluralhaps
pluralHAPs
Verb
third-person singular presenthaps
present participlehapping
past participlehapped
pasthapped

Origin of hap

From Middle English hap, happe (“chance, hap, luck, fortune”), potentially cognate with or from Old English ġehæp (“fit, convenient”) and/or Old Norse happ (“hap, chance, good luck”), from Proto-Germanic *hampą (“convenience, happiness”), from Proto-Indo-European *kob- (“good fortune, prophecy; to bend, bow, fit in, work, succeed”). Cognate with Icelandic happ (“hap, chance, good luck”). Related also to Icelandic heppinn (“lucky, fortunate, happy”), Old Danish hap (“fortunate”), Swedish hampa (“to turn out”), Old Church Slavonic кобь (kobĭ, “fate”), Old Irish cob (“victory”). The verb is from Middle English happen, perhaps from Old English hæppan (“to move accidentally, slip”) and/or from Old Norse *happa, *heppa, from Proto-Germanic *hampijaną (“to fit in, be fitting”), from the noun. Cognate with Old Danish happe (“to chance, happen”), Norwegian heppa (“to occur, happen”).

Clipping of happening.

Inherited from Old English hap.

Words formed from hap

Words that rhyme with hap

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about hap

What does hap mean?
Hap means a person's lot (good or bad), luck, fortune, fate.
What is hap in Hindi?
Hap in Hindi is एच. ए. पी, हैप. See Hap meaning in Hindi.
How do you use hap in a sentence?
[I]t hath been many an honest man's hap to pass for the father of children he never begot […]
What part of speech is hap?
Hap can be a noun or a verb.
How do you pronounce hap?
Hap is pronounced /hæp/.
What is the plural of hap?
The plural of hap is haps.

Words near hap in the dictionary

  1. haori
  2. haors
  3. Haos
  4. Haotang
  5. Haoxue
  6. hap
  7. hap'orth
  8. hap'orths
  9. hap-harlot
  10. hap-harlots
  11. hap-hazard

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hap (page history and authors); HAP (page history and authors); hap (Hindi, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); hap (Tamil, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); hap (Marathi, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); hap (Urdu, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); hap (Bengali, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); hap (Malayalam, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); hap (Kannada, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); hap (Punjabi, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); hap (Gujarati, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); hap (Odia, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license). 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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-hap.ogg.

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