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Where does the word cop come fom?

Updated: 10/10/2023
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13y ago

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Likely this slang word for a police officer can be traced back to the Old French word caper, which meant to take or to seize. It entered English as cap before 1589. The word is used in "Plaine Perceuall the Peace-maker of England" by Richard Harvey.

Cap him sirra, if he pay it not.

The word appears before there was standardized spelling so, at the beginning of the 18th century, the pronunciation and spelling had changed to cop.

The shift to noun and the meaning of policeman (copper, one who cops; i.e., one who takes or seizes) occurred about a century and a half later.

False etymologies include the acronym, Constable On Patrol, but the word appeared prior to any other known acronym.

Another false etymology asserts that the word refers to the copper buttons police uniforms or to the copper badges police wore.
The term "cop" does actually derive from the copper badge that the keystone cops had in Europe.

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14y ago
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15y ago

Theories for the origin of cop abound, including the copper badge explanation you mention. We'd always been under the impression that the term was an acronym for "constable on patrol." Well, it seems we're both mistaken, as we learned from our roundabout quest for the answer. A simple Yahoo! search on "cop" returned many relevant categories, but we came up empty after checking sites in several categories. We decided to narrow our probe by searching for "origin of cop" (using quotation marks around the term). We weren't expecting much, but when one of the results turned out to be a page from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary we clicked hopefully. What we found was basically an advertisement for the Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories. At first we were disappointed, but then we realized why this page had appeared in the search results -- the word "cop" was one of the sample entries. Around the year 1700, the slang verb copentered English usage, meaning "to get ahold of, catch, capture." By 1844, cop showed up in print, and soon thereafter the -er suffix was added, and a policeman became a copper, one who cops or catches and arrests criminals. Copper first appeared in print in 1846, the use of cop as a short form copper occured in 1859.

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13y ago

The original term was "copper".

While commonly believed to be an acronym for Constable On Patrol, the term refers to "one who captures or snatches". This word first appeared in the early 18th century, and can be matched with the word "cap", which has the same meaning and whose etymology can be traced to the Latin word 'capere'. (The word retains this meaning in other contexts: teenagers "cop a feel" on a date, and they have also been known to "cop an attitude

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