stamp

Definitions

General English

  • noun a

    little

    piece of

    paper

    with

    a price printed on it

    which

    you stick on a

    letter

    to show

    that

    you

    have

    paid for it to be sent by post
  • noun a mark made on

    something

  • verb to walk

    heavily

    , banging

    your

    feet on the ground

Banking

  • noun a device for making marks on documents; a mark made in this way
  • verb to mark a document with a stamp
  • verb to put a postage stamp on an envelope or parcel

Construction

  • A seal required on

    drawings

    for commercial projects that contains the

    architect

    's or

    engineer

    's name and registration number. The individual's signature is usually required over the stamp.

Information & Library Science

  • noun something which marks another object to show that it has been processed
  • verb to use a

    rubber stamp

    to mark something

Media Studies

  • noun a small block with a raised design or

    lettering

    that can be printed onto paper by inking the block and pressing it to the paper

Travel

  • verb to stick a stamp on a

    letter

    or parcel

Origin & History of “stamp”

Stamp originally meant ‘crush into

small

pieces, pound’. The sense ‘slam the foot down’ did not emerge until the 14th century, and ‘imprint

with

a design by pressure’ (

which

forms the

semantic

basis of postage stamp (19th c.)) is as

recent

as the 16th century. The word comes, probably via an unrecorded Old

English

*stampian,

from

prehistoric Germanic *stampōjan (source

also

of German stampfen, Dutch stampen, Swedish stampa, and Danish stampe).

this

was derived from the

noun

*stampaz ‘pestle’, which was formed from the base *stamp- (a non-nasalized version of which, *stap-, lies

behind

English step). The Germanic

verb

was borrowed into

vulgar

Latin as *stampīre, whose

past

participle

has given English, via Mexican Spanish, stampede (19th c.).
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