verb, noun
verb (-pp-)
1 ~ (at sth) to give sb/sth a quick painful bite or PINCH:
[VN] He winced as the dog nipped his ankle. * [V] She nipped at my arm.
2 ~ (at sth) (of cold, wind, etc.) to harm or damage sth:
[V] The icy wind nipped at our faces. * [VN] growing shoots nipped by frost
3 [V+adv./prep.] (BrE, informal) to go somewhere quickly and/or for only a short time:
He's just nipped out to the bank. * A car nipped in (= got in quickly) ahead of me.
IDIOMS
nip sth in the bud to stop sth when it has just begun because you can see that problems will come from it
PHRASALVERBS
nip sth<->off to remove a part of sth with your finger or with scissors, etc.
Part of speech: noun
1 the act of giving sb a small bite or PINCH (= squeezing their skin between your finger and thumb):
The dog gave her a painful nip on the leg.
2 (informal) a feeling of cold:
There was a real nip in the air.
seealsoNIPPY
3 (informal) a small drink of strong alcohol:
a nip of brandy
IDIOMS
nip and tuck (especially AmE) = neck and neck at NECK
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About this entry
This is a English–English dictionary entry.
Sourced from Main Dictionary in Lughet's collection.
This word also appears under other sources in Lughet's collection — see the list below.
This entry for nip is sourced from Main Dictionary, one of the dictionaries and corpora merged into Lughet.
Is nip a noun, verb, or something else?
In this entry, nip is tagged as noun.
Does nip appear elsewhere on Lughet?
Yes — nip appears under other sources or language pairs in Lughet's collection. See the list below.
What is Lughet?
Lughet is a free trilingual dictionary covering nearly five million entries across Uyghur, Chinese, and English, drawn from more than ten source dictionaries and corpora.
