- a police officer
- Somebody call the cops!
- children playing cops and robbers
- a TV cop show
Extra ExamplesTopics Law and justicec1- Lots of children play cops and robbers.
- Penn stars as a rookie cop out to prove himself.
- The film is based on the true story of a New York cop.
- The star was stopped by traffic cops on Friday night.
Oxford Collocations DictionaryCop is used before these nouns:- car
- killer
- show
- …
Word Originearly 18th cent. (as a verb): perhaps from obsolete cap ‘arrest’, from Old French caper ‘seize’, from Latin capere. The noun is from copper ‘police officer’.Want to learn more?
Find out which words work together and produce more natural sounding English with the Oxford Collocations Dictionary app.
Idioms
See cop in the Oxford Advanced American Dictionaryit’s a fair cop
- (British English, informal, humorous) used by somebody who is caught doing something wrong, to say that they admit that they are wrong
not much cop
- (British English, slang) not very good
- He's not much cop as a singer.
Check pronunciation:
cop