Definitions

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

  • noun Soft or semiliquid food, as for infants.
  • noun Material lacking real value or substance.
  • noun Slang Money and favors obtained as political patronage.
  • noun A teat or nipple.
  • noun Something resembling a teat or nipple, such as a steep hill.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • To feed with pap.
  • noun Papa; father.
  • noun A short cylindrical projection used to furnish a hold for the lathe-center on a easting which is to be turned; a socket; a tit.
  • noun Soft food for infants, usually made of bread boiled or softened with water or milk.
  • noun Hence The emoluments of public office, as salaries, fees, or perquisites.
  • noun The pulp of fruit, or pulp of any kind.
  • noun A teat; a nipple; the breast of a woman.
  • noun A conical hill resembling a nipple or teat: as, the Paps of Jura (an island west of Scotland.).

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

  • noun (Anat.) A nipple; a mammilla; a teat.
  • noun A rounded, nipplelike hill or peak; anything resembling a nipple in shape; a mamelon.
  • noun A soft food for infants, made of bread boiled or softened in milk or water.
  • noun Any speech, writing, or idea lacking substance, or of trivial content; oversimplified, trite, or worthless ideas.
  • noun Colloq. & Contemptuous Nourishment or support from official patronage.
  • noun The pulp of fruit.
  • transitive verb To feed with pap.

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

  • noun uncountable Food in the form of a soft paste, often a porridge, especially as given to very young children.
  • noun uncountable, colloquial Nonsense.
  • noun South Africa Porridge.
  • adjective slang, South Africa Spineless, wet, without character.
  • verb transitive, obsolete To feed with pap.
  • adjective : Flat
  • noun Pap smear
  • verb Of a paparazzo, to take a surreptitious photograph of (someone, especially a celebrity) without their consent.

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

  • noun the small projection of a mammary gland
  • noun a diet that does not require chewing; advised for those with intestinal disorders
  • noun worthless or oversimplified ideas

Etymologies

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

[Middle English, from Old French papa, from Latin, children's word for food.]

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

[Middle English pappe, probably from Latin papilla; see papilla.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Origins unclear. Related to Middle Low German pappe, Dutch pap, Old French papa/pape, Latin pappa, Bulgarian папам ("to eat") and Serbo-Croatian папати/papati ("to eat"), among others. The relationships between these words are difficult to reconstruct.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Middle English pappe, of uncertain origin. Perhaps form Latin papilla; or perhaps compare Old Swedish papp ("breast, nipple"), from Proto-Germanic *pap- (“nipple”), of imitative origin, or from Proto-Indo-European *pap- (“pock mark, nipple”); Swedish dialectal papp, pappe, Swedish patt, Danish patte, North Frisian pap, pape, papke ("breast, pap").

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Shortened form of Pap smear from Georgios Papanikolaou, American physician.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From paparazzo

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  • 'noun Something resembling a teat or nipple, such as a steep hill.'

    June 23, 2020