different between flop vs flutter

English

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /fl?p/
• (General American) IPA^(key): /fl?p/
• Rhymes: -?p

Etymology 1

Recorded since 1602, probably a variant of flap with a duller, heavier sound

Verb

flop (third-person singular simple present flops, present participle flopping, simple past and past participle flopped)

1. (intransitive) To fall heavily due to lack of energy.

   (Can we find and add a quotation of Charles Dickens to this entry?)

2. (transitive) To cause to drop heavily.

3. (intransitive, informal) To fail completely; not to be successful at all (of a movie, play, book, song etc.).

4. (sports, intransitive) To pretend to be fouled in sports, such as basketball, hockey (the same as to dive in soccer)

5. (intransitive) To strike about with something broad and flat, as a fish with its tail, or a bird with its wings; to rise and fall; to flap.

6. (poker, transitive) To have (a hand) using the community cards dealt on the flop.

7. (intransitive, slang) To stay, sleep or live in a place.
   • 1969, Howard E. Freeman, Norman R. Kurtz, America's Troubles: A Casebook on Social Conflict, Prentice-Hall, Page 414,

     […] not just the old material goal of "three hots and a place to flop," […]

   • 1973, Alan Watts, Cloud-Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown: A Mountain Journal, Pantheon Books, page 135,

     They have opened up crypts and basements as immense pads where vagrant and impoverished hippies can flop for the night.

8. (transitive) To flip; to reverse (an image).
   • 1968, Advertising Techniques (volumes 4-5, page 28)

     The possibilities of this type of shot are almost limitless. By quartering the screen and duplicating and flopping the picture, a kaleidoscopic effect is achieved.

   • 1986, Functional Photography (volumes 21-23, page 58)

     […] in order to flop the image left-to-right, or all printing will appear reversed.

Derived terms

Translations

Noun

flop (plural flops)

1. An incident of a certain type of fall; a plopping down.
2. A complete failure, especially in the entertainment industry.

   Synonyms: dud, fiasco, turkey, box office bomb
3. (poker) The first three cards turned face-up by the dealer in a community card poker game.
   • 1996: John Patrick, John Patrick's Casino Poker: Professional Gambler's Guide to Winning

     The flop didn't help you but probably did help the other hands.

   • 2003: Lou Krieger, Internet Poker: How to Play and Beat Online Poker Games

     Here are six tips to help you play successfully on the flop (the first three communal cards).

   • 2005: Henry Stephenson, Real Poker Night: Taking Your Home Game to a New Level

     The strength of your hand now has nothing to do with how strong it may have been before the flop.

4. A ponded package of dung, as in a cow-flop.
   • 1960, Winston Graham, Ross Poldark: A Novel of Cornwall, 1783-1787, Bodley Head, Page 302,

     "Maybe as you think," he said, "because as I've the misfortune of an accidental slip on a cow-flop therefore I has the inability of an unborn babe, ...

   • 2000, Dean King, A Sea of Words: A Lexicon and Companion for Patrick O'Brian's Seafaring Tales, Henry Holt & Co., Page 162,

     ... cowpat or cow-flop, Cow dung, often used dry as heating fuel.

   • 2003, John W. Billheimer, Drybone Hollow, St. Martin's Press, Page 215,

     "Cow flop in a neat package is still cow flop. What did Cable stand to gain from the flood?"

   • 2018 Brent Butt as Brent Herbert Leroy, "Sasquatch Your Language", Corner Gas Animated

     Wherever legitimate tracks are found there's always some fresh scat, y'know, poo, flop, dumplings.

5. (slang) A flophouse.
   • 2013, Gardner Dozois, Jack Dann, Dangerous Games

     He was kind of worn but the tooth said he'd never lost a fight or slept in a flop.

Derived terms

Translations

Adverb

flop (not comparable)

1. Right, squarely, flat-out.
2. With a flopping sound.

See also

• aflop

Related terms

• flip-flop

Etymology 2

A variant capitalization of FLOP, a syllabic acronym of floating-point operations.

Noun

flop (plural flops)

1. (computing) One floating-point operation per second, a unit of measure of processor speed.
   • 1992 March 2, Richard Preston, The New Yorker, "The Mountains of Pi":

     The gigaflop supercomputers of today are almost useless. What is needed is a teraflop machine. That’s a machine that can run at a trillion flops, a trillion floating-point operations per second, or roughly a thousand times as fast as Cray Y-MP8.

2. (computing) Abbreviation of floating-point operation.
   • 1993 August 17, New York Times, C8:

     The Correlator can perform 750 billion ‘flops’, or simple calculations, per second.

Alternative forms

• (unit of processing speed): FLOPS
• (floating-point operation): FLOP

Derived terms

References

• “FLOP, n2.”, in OED Online ?, Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, December 2012

Dutch

Etymology

Borrowed from English flop. See also flap.

Pronunciation

• Rhymes: -?p

Noun

flop m (plural floppen or flops, diminutive flopje n)

1. A failure, something that went wrong
2. short for floppydisk

Synonyms

• fiasco (1)
• mislukking (1)
• sof (1)
• diskette (2)

Verb

flop

1. first-person singular present indicative of floppen
2. imperative of floppen

Anagrams

• plof

Indonesian

Etymology 1

From Dutch flop

Noun

flop

1. failure, something that went wrong

Etymology 2

From English flop

Noun

flop

1. (sports) flop, to strike about with something broad and flat, to rise and fall, to flap.

Further reading

• “flop” in Kamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia (KBBI) Daring, Jakarta: Badan Pengembangan dan Pembinaan Bahasa, Kementerian Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan Republik Indonesia, 2016.

English

Etymology

From Middle English floteren, from Old English floterian, flotorian (“to float about, flutter”), from Proto-Germanic *flutr?n?, frequentative of Proto-Germanic *flut?n? (“to float”), equivalent to float +? -er (frequentative suffix). Cognate with Low German fluttern, fluddern (“to flutter”), German flittern, Dutch fladderen; also Albanian flutur (“butterfly”). More at float.

Pronunciation

• (General American) IPA^(key): /?fl?t?/, [?fl???]
• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /?fl?t?/
• Rhymes: -?t?(?)

Verb

flutter (third-person singular simple present flutters, present participle fluttering, simple past and past participle fluttered)

1. (intransitive) To flap or wave quickly but irregularly.
2. (intransitive) Of a winged animal: to flap the wings without flying; to fly with a light flapping of the wings.
3. (intransitive, aerodynamics) To undergo divergent oscillations (potentially to the point of causing structural failure) due to a positive feedback loop between elastic deformation and aerodynamic forces.
4. (transitive) To cause something to flap.

5. (transitive) To drive into disorder; to throw into confusion.
6. (intransitive) To be in a state of agitation or uncertainty.
7. (intransitive, obsolete) To be frivolous.

Translations

Noun

flutter (countable and uncountable, plural flutters)

1. The act of fluttering; quick and irregular motion.
   • c. 1838, Richard Monckton Milnes, The Forest

     the chirp and flutter of some single bird

2. A state of agitation.

   • flutter of spirits

   • 1900, Henry James, The Soft Side The Third Person Chapter 3

     Their visitor was an issue - at least to the imagination, and they arrived finally, under provocation, at intensities of flutter in which they felt themselves so compromised by his hoverings that they could only consider with relief the fact of nobody's knowing.

3. An abnormal rapid pulsation of the heart.
4. (uncountable, aerodynamics) An extremely dangerous divergent oscillation caused by a positive feedback loop between the elastic deformation of an object and the aerodynamic forces acting on it, potentially resulting in structural failure.
5. (Britain) A small bet or risky investment.
   • 30 July, 2009, Eurosport, Gray Matter: How will Schu do?

     So with his victory odds currently at 14/1 or 3/1 for the podium, he's still most certainly well worth a flutter […]

6. A hasty game of cards or similar.
7. (audio, electronics) The rapid variation of signal parameters, such as amplitude, phase, and frequency.

Derived terms

• aflutter
• flutter in the dovecote
• flutterby
• fluttersome
• fluttery

Translations