Stope

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: [stoʊp]

Definitions

1. A horizontal or inclined opening made underground to extract ore in mining operations
2. An underground cavity created within a mine to remove valuable minerals
3. A mined-out space beneath the surface where minerals have been extracted

Etymology: "Stope" is a mining term for a void left underground after ore has been dug out, and its history is a matter of educated guesswork. Mining writers have long connected it with "step," the familiar word for a foot's movement, and the link is plausible: a stope is often a series of stepped working levels cut into the rock. The sound change from "step" to "stope" does not follow a neat pattern, however, so the connection remains an apparent one rather than a proven descent. A more specific suggestion points across the North Sea. Middle Low German had a word "stōpe" meaning "step," and a related Low German form "Stoop" carried the same sense. Mining was a major industry in German-speaking lands, and many technical terms passed into English from miners' German, so a Low German source is a credible route. The word may also have come into English through the same family of words that gave us "stoop," meaning to bend or lower the body, which shares that ancestry.