Skip to main content
PlainSpell

strop

/stɹɑp/noun, verb

strop is a noun meaning “A strap; more specifically a piece of leather or a substitute (notably canvas), or strip of wood covered with a suitable material, for honing a razor” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled S-T-R-O-P, and it appears about once in every 6 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of strop is strops.

What does strop mean?

noun

  1. 1

    A strap; more specifically a piece of leather or a substitute (notably canvas), or strip of wood covered with a suitable material, for honing a razor.

  2. 2

    A piece of rope spliced into a circular wreath, and put round a block for hanging it.

  3. 3

    CommonwealthIrelandUKA bad mood or temper. A tantrum.

  4. 4

    slangA poor-quality or unsaleable diamond.

verb

  1. 1

    To hone (a razor or knife) with a strop.

    One should strop the razor before each shave.

  2. 2

    obsoleteTo strap.

  3. 3

    To mark a sequence of letters syntactically as having a special property, such as being a keyword, e.g. by enclosing in apostrophes as in 'foo' or writing in uppercase as in FOO.

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

How do you pronounce strop?

  • UK /stɹɒp/
  • US /stɹɑp/

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

Forms of strop

  • strops plural, present, singular, he/she/it
  • stropping participle, present
  • stropped participle, past

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

How common is strop?

Strop appears about once in every 6 million words in written English, the 73,203rd 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).

Strop in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese

LanguageWords
Frenchlanière (strap), estrope (rope)
GermanRiemen (strap)

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 strop come from?

Same as strap (which see); recorded in English since 1702. The verb sense referring to honing a sharp edge is recorded since 1842.

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