Each year, we carefully ____ the gifts with beautiful paper and ribbons.
CEFR Practice Quiz (Alternate)
Please remember to ____ the gift in some several colorful and bright paper before you go to the party today.
Word Origin & History
From Middle English wrappen (“to wrap, fold”), of uncertain origin. Perhaps related to North Frisian wrappe (“to press into; stop up”), dialectal Danish vrappe (“to stuff, cram”), Middle Low German rincworpen (“to envelop, wrap”), Middle Low German wrempen (“to wrinkle, scrunch the face”), all perhaps tied to Proto-Indo-European *werp-, *werb- (“to turn, twist, bend”).
Compare also similar-sounding and similar-meaning Middle English wlappen (“to wrap, lap, envelop, fold”), Middle Dutch lappen (“to wrap up”), Old Italian goluppare (“to wrap”) (from Germanic). Doublet of lap; related to envelop, develop. Also compare Latin verber (“whip, lash”).
Literary Quotations & Historical Citations
"I then dried these over a flame, and then, wrapping the formes and re-sealing them with my court seals — for my only commission, you see, was to report as to whether the type was unpied, and text ungarbled, and the formes all ready […]"
— 1947, Harry Stephen Keeler, The Case of the Barking Clock:
"Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch / About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams."
— 1811, William Cullen Bryant, Thanatopsis:
"The prehistoric caribou they had already liberated was wrapped in a space blanket and carefully tied to a sled. The Science Foundation team had then moved on to a deep translucent blue seam in the ice that proved to be a window on the rest of the ungulant herd standing poised in suspended animation, as if waiting for time to start again."
— 2003, Gary Tigerman, The Orion Protocol, New York, N.Y.: William Morrow, →ISBN, page 143:
"wise poets that wrap truth in tales"
— a. 1640, Thomas Carew, Ingrateful Beauty Threatened:
"The media theorist Peter Lunenfeld[…] says illustrative art is often used to defang threatening technology. He compares the Waymo wraps to Google Doodles, which distract people while they are using a complex and opaque search engine algorithm that is “almost fully beyond our ken.”"
— 2025 December 9, Jori Finkel, “How Art Is Driving Waymo’s Feel-Good Branding”, in The New York Times, New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC: