Strop

Pronunciation

• Rhymes: -É’p

Same as strap (which see); recorded in English since 1702.

Full definition of strop

Noun

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, in this sense also called razor strop.
2. (British) A bad mood or temper (see stroppy.)
3. (nautical) A piece of rope spliced into a circular wreath, and put round a block for hanging it.

Synonyms

• huff

Verb

1. (obsolete) To strap.
2. (recorded since 1842; now most used) To hone (a razor) with a strop.One should strop the razor before each shave.

From apostrophe, due to use of apostrophes as single quotation marks to indicate boldface in ALGOL 60.

Proceedings of an International Conference on ALGOL 68 Implementation: Department of Computer Science, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, June 18-20, 1974, ed. Peter R. King, University of Manitoba. Dept. of Computer Science, p. 148 – More serious problems are posed by "stropping," the technique used to distinguish boldface text from roman text. Some implementations demand apostrophes around boldface (whence the name stropping); others require backspacing and underlining; ...

Other methods were used, especially in ALGOL 68, where the earlier matched apostrophes were no longer common,

Revised Report on the Algorithmic Language ALGOL 68, p. 123, footnote

and the term became used more generally for any such method.

Verb

1. (computing) To syntactically mark a sequence of letters 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

Anagrams

• ports, sport, SPORT