Word.ws English Dictionary

tippe top

tippe top noun: a spinning top of a shape with counterintuitive behavior: generally mushroomlike or spherical, with a rounded head and a short stem; when spun head-down on a smooth, flat surface, it inverts its attitude so that it spins head-up, on the tip of the stem, until it loses momentum and falls over.

tippe top: a spinning top of a shape with counterintuitive behavior: generally mushroomlike or spherical, with...
Image: Anton, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

tippe top (plural tippe tops)

  1. A spinning top of a shape with counterintuitive behavior: generally mushroomlike or spherical, with a rounded head and a short stem; when spun head-down on a smooth, flat surface, it inverts its attitude so that it spins head-up, on the tip of the stem, until it loses momentum and falls over.
    • On a flat surface, the tippe top will rest stably with its stem up. However, spun fast enough on its blunt end, the tippe top momentarily defies gravity, inverts, and spins on its stem until dissipation causes it to slow down and then fall over.2008 January, Nawaf M. Bou-Rabee, Jerrold E. Marsden, Louis A. Romero, “Dissipation-Induced Heteroclinic Orbits in Tippe Tops”, in SIAM Review, volume 50, number 2, →DOI, →ISSN, pages 325–344

Forms of tippe top

pluraltippe tops
alternative formtippy top

Origin of tippe top

Coined by Danish engineer Werner Østberg in the 1950s.

Questions about tippe top

What does tippe top mean?
Tippe top means a spinning top of a shape with counterintuitive behavior: generally mushroomlike or spherical, with a rounded head and a short stem; when spun head-down on a smooth, flat surface, it inverts its attitude so that it spins head-up, on the tip of the stem, until it loses momentum and falls over.
What part of speech is tippe top?
Tippe top is a noun.
What is the plural of tippe top?
The plural of tippe top is tippe tops.

Words near tippe top in the dictionary

  1. Tipp-Exing
  2. tippa
  3. tippability
  4. tippable
  5. Tippah County
  6. tippe top
  7. tippe tops
  8. Tippecanoe
  9. Tippecanoe County
  10. tipped
  11. tipped back

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: tippe top (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: “tippe top.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/tippe_top. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.