Verb. (colloquial).—To despond.
1596. Shakspeare, Hamlet, iii. 4. 81. Or but a sickly part of one
true sense. Could not so mope.
1635. Quarles, Emblems, i. 8. One’s mop’d, the other’s mad.
1667. Milton, Paradise Lost, xi. 485. Moping melancholy and
moon-struck madness.
1749. Gray, Elegy. The moping owl doth to the moon complain.
d. 1792. Horne, Works, v. 23. It directs him not to shut himself up
in a cloister, alone, there to mope and moan away his life.
1888. Rolf Boldrewood, Robbery Under Arms, li. You’d better think
over your situation and don’t mope.
Moped, adj. (colloquial).—See quots. 1690 and 1785. Also mopish, moping
and mope-eyed.
1621. Fletcher, Pilgrim, iii. 3. What a mope-ey’d ass was I.
1640. Wit’s Recr. [Hotten], 465. Mop-ey’d I am, as some have said,
Because I’ve liv’d so long a Maid.
1647. Beaumont and Fletcher, Humourous Lieutenant, iv. 6. He is
bewitched, or moped, or his brains melted.
d. 1656. Bp. Hall, Spirituale Bedleem, 29. ‘Here one mopishly
stupid, and so fixed to his posture, as if he were a breathing
statue.’
1690. B. E., Dict. Cant. Crew, s.v. Mop-eied, one that can’t see
well, by living too long a maid. Ibid. Mop’d, maz’d.
1717. Killinbeck, Sermons, 348. [They are] generally traduced as a
sort of mopish and unsociable creatures.
1785. Grose, Vulg. Tongue, s.v. Moped. Stupid, melancholy for want
of society.
1880. Rhoda Broughton, Second Thoughts, viii. ‘She sits drearily
stitching, absently reading, mopingly thinking.’
Moppet. See Mop, subs. sense 4.
Moppy, adj. (common).—Drunk. For synonyms see Drinks and Screwed.
Mop-squeezer, subs. (common).—A housemaid.
1785. Grose, Vulg. Tongue, s.v.
Mopsy, subs. (old).—1. A familiar term for a woman: specifically a
young girl; a mop (q.v. sense 4).