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Definitions

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

  1. v. To break or chip (stone) with sharp blows, as in shaping flint or obsidian into tools.
  2. v. Chiefly British To strike sharply; rap.
  3. v. Chiefly British To snap at or bite.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

  1. To strike with a sharp noise.
  2. To snap; crack; break in pieces with blows: as, to knap stones.
  3. To bite; bite off; nibble.
  4. To make a short sharp sound.
  5. To talk short.
  6. n. A short sharp noise; a snap.
  7. n. A stroke; blow.
  8. n. A clapper.
  9. n. A protuberance; a swelling; a knob or button.
  10. n. A rising ground; a knoll; a hillock; a summit.
  11. n. The bud of a flower.
  12. n. The flower of the common clover, Trifolium pratense.

Wiktionary

  1. v. To shape a hard, brittle material (such as flint, obsidian, chert etc.) by breaking away sections or flakes, often forming a sharp edge or point. Distinguished from "carve" because each fracture goes across one entire face or facet, and from "cleave" because breaking (knapping) vitreous, brittle homogeneous (i.e, not crystalline) materials inevitably results in curved, conchoidal fractures.
  2. n. The crest of a hill
  3. n. A small hill

GNU Webster's 1913

  1. n. A protuberance; a swelling; a knob; a button; hence, rising ground; a summit. See knob, and knop.
  2. v. To bite; to bite off; to break short.
  3. v. To strike smartly; to rap; to snap.
  4. v. To make a sound of snapping.
  5. n. A sharp blow or slap.

WordNet 3.0

  1. v. break a small piece off from
  2. v. strike sharply

Etymologies

  1. Middle English knappen, probably of imitative origin.

Examples

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Lists

These user-created lists contain the word ‘knap’.

Comments

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  • seanahan You have a strange job. Oct 29, 2007

  • chained_bear I remember this delightful word from stage combat training. It's the sound of being "struck," usually made by the victim rather than the aggressor (with notable exceptions), to complete the illusion of there being actual contact.

    Nowadays I hear guys at work using the word to describe chipping a flint into the proper shape/size for use in a musket. Oct 29, 2007

‘knap’ has been looked up 931 times, added to 9 lists, commented on 2 times, and has a Scrabble score of 10.