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PlainSpell

lope

/loʊp/verb, noun

lope is a verb meaning “To travel an easy pace with long strides” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled L-O-P-E and has one syllable, and it appears about once in every 3 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data).

What does lope mean?

verb

  1. 1

    To travel an easy pace with long strides.

    He loped along, hour after hour, not fast but steady and covering much ground.

  2. 2

    obsoleteTo jump, leap.

noun

  1. 1

    An easy pace with long strides.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How do you pronounce lope?

  • UK /ləʊp/
  • US /loʊp/

Lope has one syllable (counted from its American pronunciation in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary).

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: En-us-lope.ogg, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).

Forms of lope

  • lopes present, singular, he/she/it, plural
  • loping participle, present
  • loped participle, past

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How common is lope?

Lope appears about once in every 3 million words in written English, the 49,368th most frequent word form in the list.

Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

Lope in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese

LanguageWords
Frenchcourir en bondissant (to travel an easy pace with long strides)
Germanleicht galoppieren, kantern, eilen, springend rennen (to travel an easy pace with long strides), Kanter, leichter Galopp (easy pace with long strides)
Spanishcorrer a paso largo, trotar a zancadas, andar a zancajadas, caminar a trancos, ambular a trancadas (to travel an easy pace with long strides)

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.

Where does lope come from?

From Middle English lopen, from Old Norse hlaupa (“to leap, jump”). See leap. Cognate with German laufen (“walk, run”), Danish løbe (“run”), Dutch lopen (“walk, run”), Norwegian løpe (“run”). Doublet of leap.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).