Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A cone-shaped or cylindrical roll of yarn or thread wound on a spindle.
  • noun Chiefly British A summit or crest, as of a hill.
  • noun A police officer.
  • noun One that regulates certain behaviors or actions.
  • transitive verb To get hold of; gain or win.
  • transitive verb To perceive by one of the senses.
  • transitive verb To take unlawfully or without permission; steal.
  • idiom (cop a feel) To fondle someone sexually in a surreptitious way.
  • idiom (cop a plea) To plead guilty to a lesser charge so as to avoid standing trial for a more serious charge.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • To throw underhand.
  • noun An obsolete form of cup.
  • noun In golf, the face of a bunker.
  • noun A spider.
  • noun A policeman.
  • noun An abbreviation of Copernican;
  • noun of Coptic;
  • noun [lowercase] of copper.
  • To capture or arrest as a prisoner: as, he was copped for stealing.
  • noun The head or top of a thing; especially, the top of a hill.
  • noun A tuft on the head of birds.
  • noun A round piece of wood fixed on the top of a beehive. [Prov. Eng.]
  • noun A mound or bank; a heap of anything. [North. Eng.]
  • noun An inclosure with a ditch around it. [Prov. Eng.]
  • noun A fence. Halliwell. [Prov. Eng.]
  • noun A merlon, or portion of a battlement.
  • noun The conical ball of thread formed on the spindle of a wheel or spinning-frame. Also called coppin.
  • noun A tube upon which silk thread is sometimes wound, instead of being made into skeins.
  • noun A measure of peas, 15 sheaves in the field and 16 in the barn.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun obsolete The top of a thing; the head; a crest.
  • noun A conical or conical-ended mass of coiled thread, yarn, or roving, wound upon a spindle, etc.
  • noun A tube or quill upon which silk is wound.
  • noun (Mil. Arch.) Same as Merlon.
  • noun Slang A policeman.
  • noun a kind of cotton waste, composed chiefly of remnants of cops from which the greater part of the yarn has been unwound.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun obsolete A spider.
  • verb transitive to obtain, to purchase (as in drugs), to get hold of, to take
  • verb transitive to (be forced to) take; to receive; to shoulder; to bear, especially blame or punishment for a particular instance of wrongdoing.
  • verb transitive to steal
  • verb transitive to adopt
  • verb intransitive, usually with "to" (slang) to admit, especially to a crime.
  • noun crafts The ball of thread wound on to the spindle in a spinning machine.
  • noun obsolete The top, summit, especially of a hill.
  • noun obsolete The head.
  • noun slang, law enforcement A police officer or prison guard.
  • noun slang, offensive, African American Vernacular by extension any white male especially large and clean cut

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • verb take into custody
  • verb take by theft
  • noun uncomplimentary terms for a policeman

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English, summit, from Old English.]

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Short for copper.]

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Probably variant of cap, to catch, from Old French caper, from Latin capere; see capture.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Middle English coppe, from Old English *coppe, as in ātorcoppe ("spider", literally "venom head"), from Old English copp ("top, summit, head"), from Proto-Germanic *kuppaz (“vault, round vessel, head”), from Proto-Indo-European *gū- (“to bend, curve”). Cognate with Middle Dutch koppe, kobbe ("spider"). More at cobweb.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Possibly from Middle French capere ("to capture"), from Latin capere ("to seize, to grasp"); or possibly from Dutch kapen ("to steal"), from West Frisian kāpia ("to take away"), from Old Frisian kapia, to buy.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Old English cop, copp, from Germanic. Cognate with Dutch kop, German Kopf.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Short for copper ("police officer"), itself from cop ("one who cops") above, i.e. a criminal.

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Examples

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  • See comments on attercop.

    January 16, 2011