Word.ws English Dictionary

hippity-hop

hippity-hop adjective: moving by hopping, having an uneven gait.

Adjective

hippity-hop (comparative more hippity-hop, superlative most hippity-hop)

  1. (childish) Moving by hopping, having an uneven gait.
    • There must be hundreds of them killed every summer day - and, it's no wonder when one observes the erratic, hippity-hop way they try to cross the road.1987, G. Bennett, Birdfinding in Canada, page 21
  2. (figuratively) Proceeding through uneven stages.
    • In 1927, when United Air Lines began service over a hippity-hop route between San Francisco and Chicago, Cheyenne again rather than Denver was picked as a stop.1976, Bill Hosokawa, Thunder in the Rockies: The Incredible Denver Post, page 133

Adverb

hippity-hop (not comparable)

  1. (childish) Unevenly, with a hopping gait.
    • So he mounted the horse, which went hippity-hop, hippity-hop.1857, John Edward Taylor, “The Wild Man”, in The Fairy Ring: A Collection of Tales and Traditions, Translated from the German of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, page 101
    • Which show how the tortoise moved? hopped / waddled / scampered / scurried / plodded / ran hippity-hop / took one slow step after another1938, Elizabeth Baker, Language Journeys with our Friends, page 109

Noun (1)

hippity-hop (plural hippity-hops)

  1. (childish) A hop

Verb

hippity-hop (third-person singular simple present hippity-hops, present participle hippity-hopping, simple past and past participle hippity-hopped)

  1. (childish) to hop.

Noun (2)

hippity-hop (uncountable)

  1. (humorous) hip-hop (music)
    • I'm not much into teh hippity-hop like teh kids.2006 June 16, Talysman the Ur-Beatle, “Bob Saget lieks teh hippity-hop”, in alt.religion.kibology (Usenet)

Forms of hippity-hop

Adjective
comparativemore hippity-hop
superlativemost hippity-hop
alternative formhippedy-hop
alternative formhippety-hop
alternative formhippity-hoppity
Noun
pluralhippity-hops
Verb
third-person singular presenthippity-hops
present participlehippity-hopping
past participlehippity-hopped
pasthippity-hopped

Origin of hippity-hop

Compound of hippity + hop, in turn from hip (a regional variant of hop) + -ety. Attested since the middle nineteenth century, with hippity-hoppity appearing somewhat earlier.

Questions about hippity-hop

What does hippity-hop mean?
Hippity-hop means moving by hopping, having an uneven gait.
What part of speech is hippity-hop?
Hippity-hop can be an adjective, an adverb, a noun or a verb.

Words near hippity-hop in the dictionary

  1. hippins
  2. hippish
  3. hippity
  4. hippity hoppity
  5. hippity hoppity get off my property
  6. hippity-hop
  7. hippity-hoppity
  8. hippity-hops
  9. Hipple
  10. Hippler
  11. Hipplers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hippity-hop (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-hippity-hop.wav.

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