/strɪp/
[verb] To remove the covering, clothes, or surface layer from something, leaving it bare or exposed. It can also mean to take everything away from a person or place.
The word 'strip' once described tearing bark from a tree — nature's original act of removal.
The word 'strip' reaches back into the deep roots of the Germanic language family, arriving in Old English as 'strȳpan', meaning to plunder or to rob — a sense of violent, forceful removal rather than the more neutral uncovering we might think of today. This early form was closely tied to the idea of stripping someone of their possessions, their dignity, or their armour after battle. It was a word with weight and consequence behind it.
The Old English 'strȳpan' shares ancestry with Middle Low German 'stripen' and Middle Dutch 'strepen', all of which carried the sense of pulling or dragging something sharply away. These Germanic cousins point back to a common Proto-Germanic root, something like *streipan*, which evokes a long, dragging motion — the kind you would use to pull bark from a branch or skin from a carcass. That physical image of a long, clean peel is embedded in the word's very DNA.
By Middle English, the spelling had shifted toward 'strippen', and the word was settling into a broader range of meanings. It could describe removing clothing, tearing away a surface, or emptying a place of its contents. The idea of a long, narrow piece — what we now call 'a strip of paper' or 'a landing strip' — grew naturally from this root, as if the word itself were describing the shape left behind once something has been peeled away. The noun use developed alongside the verb, both sharing the same fundamental image of length and removal.
Interestingly, 'strip' as a noun took on a remarkable life of its own. By the 20th century, it was being used for comic strips — those long, narrow rows of illustrated panels that told a story — and later for airstrips, the long bare lanes carved out for aircraft. In British English, a sports team's 'strip' refers to their uniform, the outfit they 'strip into' for a match. Each new use carries, somewhere beneath the surface, that original idea of something long and bare, something exposed.
The word also gave English several vivid compound words and phrases. 'Striptease', which appeared in the 1930s, playfully combines the Germanic 'strip' with the French-origin 'tease' ('tease' itself coming from Old English 'tǣsan', meaning to pull apart fibres). 'Stripper' as a word for a person or a chemical that removes surfaces follows directly from the verb's core meaning. Even 'strip mall' — that peculiarly American institution — echoes the old sense of a long, bare expanse. What makes 'strip' remarkable is how consistently its meanings have stayed true to that ancient Proto-Germanic image of something long, pulled clean, and laid bare.