drop

drop
\ \ [OE] Drop, droop, and drip are closely related. Droop [13] was borrowed from Old Norse drūpa, which came from a Germanic base *drūp-. A variant of this, *drup-, produced Middle Danish drippe, the probable source of English drip [15], and a further variant, *drop-, lies behind Old English dropa, ancestor of modern English drop. All three go back ultimately to a prehistoric Indo-European *dhreub-, source of Irish druchtdew’.
\ \ The English noun originally meant ‘globule of liquid’, and its related verb ‘fall in drops’. The main modern transitive sense, ‘allow to fall’, developed in the 14th century, giving English a single word for the concept of ‘letting fall’ not shared by, for example, French and German, which have to use phrases to express it: respectively, laisser tomber and fallen lassen.
\ \ Cf.DRIP, DROOP

Word origins - 2ed. . 2005.

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  • Drop — (dr[o^]p), n. [OE. drope, AS. dropa; akin to OS. dropo, D. drop, OHG. tropo, G. tropfen, Icel. dropi, Sw. droppe; and Fr. AS. dre[ o]pan to drip, drop; akin to OS. driopan, D. druipen, OHG. triofan, G. triefen, Icel. drj[=u]pa. Cf. {Drip},… …   The Collaborative International Dictionary of English

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