alap
noun
alap is a noun meaning “The opening, improvised section of a Classical raga performance, before the formal recitation” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled A-L-A-P, and it appears about once in every 60 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of alap is alaps.
What does alap mean?
noun
- 1
The opening, improvised section of a Classical raga performance, before the formal recitation.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
Forms of alap
- alaps plural
- aalap
- alaap
- alapa
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How common is alap?
Alap appears about once in every 60 million words in written English, the 243,301st 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).
Where does alap come from?
Borrowed from Sanskrit आलापा (ālāpā).
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).