Definition
nounAny viscous liquid or paste, such as a lubricant, used in preparing a surface.
nounAn absorbent material used to hold a liquid.
Sentence Examples
You don't look like a dope.
Are you on dope?
I keep a little dope around for real emergencies.
Word Origin & History
From Dutch doop (“thick dipping sauce”), from Dutch dopen (“to dip”), from Middle Dutch dopen, from Old Dutch *dōpen, from Frankish *daupijan, from Proto-Germanic *daupijaną.
“Doop” in the sense “narcotic drug” ultimately refers to viscous opium juice, the drug of choice of the ancient Greeks; “insider information” perhaps from knowing which horse had been doped in a race. Sense of "stupid person" perhaps following from the drug sense (i.e. relating to those intoxicated on opium), compare dope up. Related to English dip and German taufen. Unrelated to dopamine.
Literary Quotations & Historical Citations
"Use a good pipe dope on the NPT threads. When applying pipe dope do not put any on the first two threads from the end. Always put dope on the male thread—never on the female thread."
— 1977, Robert O. Parmley, Standard Handbook of Fastening and Joining, New York: McGraw-Hill, →ISBN, page 247:
"Do you remember me? / How we used to be / Helpless and happy and blind? / Sunk without hope / In a haze of good dope / And cheap wine?"
— 1968, Roger Waters, “Incarceration Of A Flower Child”, performed by Marianne Faithfull, published 1999:
"If you are at all bright, don't be a grind. Grinding may make a second-hand genius of you (for all the real things are dead), and if you become a genius you will be sure to smoke dope or swallow laudanum. They all did it."
— 1900, “Gifford Arthur Nelson”, in The Naughty-Naughtian, page 118:
"But she went her way. Not until she accompanied a girl to an opium joint to discover whether dope had the merits claimed for it as a deadener of pain and a producer of happiness—not until then did Freddie come in person."
— a. 1911, David Graham Phillips, Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise:
"Here's a cure for all your troubles / Here's an end to all distress / It's the old dope peddler / With his powdered happiness"
— 1953, Tom Lehrer, “The Old Dope Peddler”, in Songs by Tom Lehrer, Pantheon, published 1981, page 18: