sappy
/ˈsæpi/
sappy adjective: excessively sweet, emotional, nostalgic; cheesy; mushy. (British equivalent: soppy).
Adjective (1)
sappy (comparative sappier, superlative sappiest)
- Excessively sweet, emotional, nostalgic; cheesy; mushy. (British equivalent: soppy)
- He was a good deal of a character, and much better company than the sappy literature he was selling.1883, Mark Twain [pseudonym; Samuel Langhorne Clemens], chapter 23, in Life on the Mississippi, Boston, Mass.: James R[ipley] Osgood and Company, →OCLC
- To himself, already beginning to resent the new employer as all that morning he had been resenting the old one, Dr. Planish groaned, “He’s getting saintly on me! A careerist in holiness! I'll never be happy till I've got an organization where I’m sole boss—unless it’s one run by a fellow like...1943, Sinclair Lewis, chapter 23, in Gideon Planish
- Having (a particularly large amount of) sap.
- ‘Torches are made to light, jewels to wear,
Dainties to taste, fresh beauty for the use,
Herbs for their smell, and sappy plants to bear:
Things growing to themselves are growth’s abuse:
Seeds spring from seeds and beauty breedeth beauty;
Thou wast begot; to get it is thy duty.1593, [William Shakespeare], Venus and Adonis, London: […] Richard Field, […], →OCLC - But these, tho’ fed with careful dirt,
Are neither green nor sappy;
Half-conscious of the garden-squirt,
The spindlings look unhappy,1842, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Amphion
- Synonyms:
- sapful
- ‘Torches are made to light, jewels to wear,
- Juicy.
- In her left hand a Cup of gold she held,
And with her right the riper fruit did reach,
Whose sappy liquor, that with fulnesse sweld,
Into her cup she scruzd, with daintie breach
Of her fine fingers, without fowle empeach,
That so faire winepresse made the wine more sweet:1590, Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Book Two, Canto XII, Stanza 56, edited by Erik Gray, Hackett, 2006, p. 214 - The words of the third article are: She will suck me at my best end. Why not? That pleaseth me right well. You know the thing; I need not tell you that it is my intercrural pudding with one end. I swear and promise that, in what I can, I will preserve it sappy, full of juice, and as well victualled...1693, François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Book III, (1546), translated by Thomas Urquhart, Chapter 18
- In her left hand a Cup of gold she held,
- Spongy; Having spaces in which large quantities of sap can flow.
- In flush-framing if is observable, that the failure of all timber in old buildings has commenced much sooner than they otherwise would have done, owing to the sappy wood being at the corners of the principal beams, which soon decays, as its spongy quality attracts the moisture; whereas the heart...1816, George Gregory, A Dictionary of Arts and Sciences - Volume 3, page 5
- ...wood is of a soft spungy nature ; sappy, and alluring to the worm.1834, William Gilpin, Thomas Dick Lauder, Remarks on Forest Scenery and Other Woodland Views, page 98
- Synonyms:
- spongelike
Adjective (2)
sappy (comparative more sappy, superlative most sappy)
sappy meaning in Urdu and Sanskrit
sappy in Urdu
- عرق دار
sappy in Sanskrit
- sappy, juicy, fertile
- इष iṣá
Examples of sappy in a sentence
- It was a sappy love song, but it reminded them of their first dance.
- The sappy green twig-tips of the season’s growth would not, she thought, be appreciably woodier on the day she became a wife, so near was the time; the tints of the foliage would hardly have changed.1886 May – 1887 April, Thomas Hardy, chapter VIII, in The Woodlanders […], volume II, London; New York, N.Y.: Macmillan and Co., published...
- As always, there was a fizzing, popping blaze of pine and sappy apple logs in the fireplace.1976, Kurt Vonnegut, chapter 8, in Slapstick, Delacorte Press, page 61:
- The freshest air floats in, smelling of sappy grasses, the delicate pollens of wild flowers, the resins of the pine forests; hinting at the chill blue scent of distant snows.2013, Margaret Leroy, The English Girl, →ISBN:
- Some housekeepers prepare their hung beef in this manner: Take the navel piece, and hang it up in your cellar as long as it will keep good, and til it begins to be a little sappy.1804, John Farley, The London Art of Cookery, and Housekeeper's Complete Assistant:
Synonyms of sappy
27 more synonymsFewer synonyms
Forms of sappy
| comparative | sappier |
|---|---|
| superlative | sappiest |
| comparative | more sappy |
| superlative | most sappy |
| alternative form | sapy |
Origin of sappy
From Middle English sappy, sapy, from Old English sæpiġ (“full of sap, succulent”), equivalent to sap + -y. Cognate with West Frisian sappig (“juicy”), Dutch sappig (“juicy, succulent”), Middle High German saffic, seffec ("juicy, succulent"; > German saftig), Danish saftig (“juicy”), Swedish saftig (“juicy”). Doublet of zaftig.
Compare Latin sapere (“to taste”).
Words formed from sappy
Words that rhyme with sappy
Questions about sappy
- What does sappy mean?
- Sappy means excessively sweet, emotional, nostalgic; cheesy; mushy. (British equivalent: soppy).
- What is sappy in Urdu?
- Sappy in Urdu is عرق دار. See Sappy meaning in Urdu.
- How do you use sappy in a sentence?
- It was a sappy love song, but it reminded them of their first dance.
- What part of speech is sappy?
- Sappy is an adjective.
- How do you pronounce sappy?
- Sappy is pronounced /ˈsæpi/.
Words near sappy in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: sappy (page history and authors); sappy (Urdu Wiktionary) (page history and authors); इष (Sanskrit) (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.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-sappy.ogg.
Cite this entry: “sappy.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sappy. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.