Cleep

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. An archaic verb meaning to call out to someone or to give something a particular name
2. An old word for calling, hailing, or naming a person or thing by a certain title
3. A dated term used in older English and Scots for summoning someone by voice or designating them by name

Etymology: "Cleep" is an alternative spelling of "clepe", a word that has been mostly lost from everyday English but survives in phrases like "called" or "known as" in older texts. Its ancestry runs back to a sound: the Proto-Germanic root "klipōną" meant "to ring" or "to sound," as in the ringing of a bell. That root came from a much older Indo-European base, "gal-", also meaning to sound. The jump from ringing to calling makes sense once you picture how sound was used to get attention. Old English "cleopian" and "clipian" meant "to speak, cry out, call, summon," so the word had shifted from the noise itself to the act of making a noise to reach someone. Calling a person by name was a kind of summoning, and over the Middle English period "clepen" and "clepien" came to mean giving someone a name or title. Related words in neighbouring languages keep the original sense alive. Dutch "kleppen" means "to toll" or "to chatter," and Middle Low German "kleppen" meant "to strike, sound," so the ringing idea persists across the family.

Synonyms: cheep, chirp, peep