/nɪp/
[verb] To pinch or squeeze something sharply between two surfaces, such as fingers or teeth; also used to mean cutting something short or stopping it quickly before it gets bigger.
When you 'nip something in the bud', you are borrowing a gardener's trick that goes back to Viking-era Norse.
The word 'nip' traces its roots to the Old Norse word 'hnippa', meaning to poke, prod, or push sharply. Old Norse was the language of the Scandinavian peoples who raided and settled across Britain from the 8th century onwards, and many of their everyday, physical words slipped quietly into the English language and stayed. Words describing sudden, bodily actions — pinching, poking, cutting — were especially likely to survive because they described experiences common to everyone, regardless of social class or education.
From Old Norse 'hnippa', the word entered Middle English somewhere in the 14th century, appearing in texts as 'nippen' or 'nyppen', carrying the sense of a sharp, sudden squeeze or bite. The Low German word 'nippen' and Middle Dutch 'nipen' — both meaning to pinch — ran alongside the Old Norse form and likely reinforced its adoption into English, since traders and sailors from the Low Countries were in constant contact with English ports throughout the medieval period. The path looks something like this: Old Norse 'hnippa' and Middle Dutch 'nipen' → Middle English 'nippen' → Modern English 'nip'.
The physical meaning came first: a nip was the action of pinching flesh between fingernails or catching something between two sharp edges. From this, it naturally extended to the bite of a small animal — a dog or crab might 'nip' at your fingers — and then to the bite of cold air. By the 17th century, people were using 'nip' to describe the sharp, biting chill of winter frost, giving us phrases like 'there's a nip in the air', which treats cold weather almost as a living thing with teeth.
The phrase 'nip in the bud' became widely used in the 17th century and draws directly from gardening. Gardeners had long known that pinching off a flower bud early — before it opened — would redirect a plant's energy. Applied to problems, ideas, or bad habits, it meant stopping something at its very earliest stage, before it had a chance to grow and bloom into something much harder to control. The phrase appeared in print by the early 1600s, and its logic was so clear and vivid that it has never needed replacing.
In British English, 'nip' also became a casual verb meaning to move quickly or briefly somewhere — 'I'll just nip to the shops' — a sense that probably grew from the idea of a quick, darting motion, like the snap of a bite. A separate but related noun use, 'a nip' meaning a small measure of spirits, is thought to come from 'nipperkin', a small drinking vessel recorded in the 17th century, though the exact origin of that word is less certain. Together, these meanings — to pinch, to bite, to cut short, to move swiftly — all share the same underlying idea: something small, sharp, and sudden.