Cleeps

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. Calls out to someone or summons them, a usage found mainly in Scots dialect
2. Speaks out loud to attract a person's attention, as in older Scottish speech
3. Shouts or hails another person, typically in the regional English of Scotland

Etymology: "Cleeps" is the third-person singular present of "cleep," a Scots and northern English verb meaning "to call out" or "to cry out." It is the form that would be used after "he," "she," or "it," as in "she cleeps to her dog." Its ancestry runs back to Old English "clipian," which meant "to call" or "to cry," and which also gave English "clepe," an old word for "to name" that survives mostly in archaic writing. The verb is a good example of a Scots and northern sound that stayed in dialect while the rest of English moved on. Early English texts, including the Old English poem "Beowulf" in its own forms, show the root "clip-" in the sense of calling aloud, and the Scottish variant "cleek" shows how the vowel shifted over the centuries. Dictionary records for "cleep" are thinner than for common verbs, so its exact path through Middle English is not fully documented.