Word.ws English Dictionary

strop

UK/stɹɒp/US/stɹɑp/

strop noun: a strap; more specifically a piece of leather or a substitute (notably canvas), or strip of wood covered with a suitable material, for honing a razor.

Noun (1)

strop (plural strops)

  1. A strap; more specifically a piece of leather or a substitute (notably canvas), or strip of wood covered with a suitable material, for honing a razor.
    • Cheap razors are a mistake, as they soon lose their edge. A good razor requires no strop. It has been suggested as an excellent plan to have a case of seven razors—one for each day in the week—so that they are all equally used.1876, Eliza Bisbee Duffey, Our Behaviour: A Manual of Etiquette and Dress of the Best American Society, Philadelphia
    Synonyms:
    razor strop
  2. A piece of rope spliced into a circular wreath, and put round a block for hanging it.

Verb (1)

strop (third-person singular simple present strops, present participle stropping, simple past and past participle stropped)

  1. To hone (a razor or knife) with a strop.
    • One should strop the razor before each shave.
    • The barber—a round, bustling fellow—stropped his razor and prattled gossip.1891, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, chapter 1, in The Blue Pavilions
  2. (obsolete) To strap.

Noun (2)

strop (plural strops)

  1. (Commonwealth, Ireland, UK) A bad mood or temper. A tantrum.
    Synonyms:
    huff

Verb (2)

strop (third-person singular simple present strops, present participle stropping, simple past and past participle stropped)

  1. To mark a sequence of letters syntactically as having a special property, such as being a keyword, e.g. by enclosing in apostrophes as in 'foo' or writing in uppercase as in FOO.

Noun (3)

strop (plural strops)

  1. (slang) A poor-quality or unsaleable diamond.
    • […] he almost fell out of the phone booth laughing and said to her, 'Boy, did my son buy a strop! Did he get stuck!'2005, Renée Rose Shield, Diamond Stories: Enduring Change on 47th Street, page 156

strop meaning in Bengali and Kannada

strop in Bengali

strop
চামাটি camaṭi

strop in Kannada

ಬಾರು

Synonyms of strop

Forms of strop

Noun
pluralstrops
Verb
third-person singular presentstrops
present participlestropping
past participlestropped
paststropped

Origin of strop

Same as strap (which see); recorded in English since 1702. The verb sense referring to honing a sharp edge is recorded since 1842.

Back-formation from stroppy.

From apostrophe, due to use of apostrophes as single quotation marks to indicate boldface in ALGOL 60. Other methods were used, especially in ALGOL 68, where the earlier matched apostrophes were no longer common, and the term became used more generally for any such method.

Words formed from strop

Phrases with strop

Words that rhyme with strop

44 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about strop

What does strop mean?
Strop means a strap; more specifically a piece of leather or a substitute (notably canvas), or strip of wood covered with a suitable material, for honing a razor.
What is strop in Bengali?
Strop in Bengali is চামাটি (camaṭi). See Strop meaning in Bengali.
What part of speech is strop?
Strop can be a noun or a verb.
How do you pronounce strop?
Strop is pronounced /stɹɒp/ (UK).
What is the plural of strop?
The plural of strop is strops.

Words near strop in the dictionary

  1. Stroop test
  2. Stroop tests
  3. Stroops
  4. stroopwafel
  5. stroopwafels
  6. strop
  7. Strope
  8. Stropes
  9. strophalloside
  10. strophaloi
  11. strophalos

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: strop (page history and authors); চামাটি (Bengali) (page history and authors); strop (Kannada Wiktionary) (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-au-strop.ogg.

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