Cowp
To tip over. To fall over. To overturn. A bucket cowps; a chair cowps; a person who trips and falls has cowped. Transitive and intransitive: 'he cowped the bucket' (he tipped it over), 'she cowped on the ice' (she fell).
Etymology
From Scots 'cowp' (= to overturn, tilt, fall over), Older Scots 'coup'. The word is shared across Scots and Northern English dialects; The 'ow' sound carries the falling-over image - a quick fall is a cowp. Modern Ulster Scots uses the verb freely; English-Ireland speakers will more often say 'tip over' or 'fall over'.
In a sentence
"Mind your tea - the cat's about to cowp the table."
Historical notes
Cowp covers the small physical action that English elsewhere needs two or three words for. 'It cowped over' is direct; 'it tipped over and fell down' is the standard English equivalent. The construction 'to cowp the creels' (= to overturn the fishing creels, hence to fail at a task) is a documented Scots and Ulster Scots idiom of failure, still heard occasionally. Cowp is one of the small Scots-origin verbs that Ulster speech preserves where southern Hiberno-English does not.
Sources
- Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL), entry COWP v. · dictionary
- Macafee, Caroline. A Concise Ulster Dictionary. Oxford University Press, 1996. · dictionary