New York City police uniforms, 1854
25 July 2020
Why are policeman called cops? The question has vexed many, and several false etymologies have sprouted up in attempts to explain the term. But the term’s origin is rather simple really. It comes from the English dialectal verb to cop, meaning to grab or seize. Thus, a copper or cop is one who makes arrests.
The verb ultimately comes from the Latin capere, meaning to seize, to grasp. It makes its way into English legal language via Anglo-Norman French, which is no surprise as many English legal terms are legacies of the Norman Conquest. When the Normans took over, they imported their laws and legal terminology. The jargon terms writ of cape and writ of capias, referring to authorizations to seize a debtor’s property, appear in the 1419 Liber Albus (White Book), a book of laws governing the city of London:
Et al proschein Hustenge apres la tierce essone, si les tenauntz facent defalt, proces serra fait devers eaux par Graunt Cape, ou Petit Cape apres apparaunce; et altre proces, come au Comune Ley.
(And at the next Hustings after the third attempt, if the tenants default, process shall be made against them by Grand Cape; or by Petit Cape after appearance; and by other process, as at Common Law.)
And:
Et les clerks et ministres des ditz Viscountz, meyntenaunt sur les pleyntes faitz, usent de agarder Capias et autres proces envers les defendantz par tesmoignaunce des sergeauntz del dit office a ceo deputeez, sibien es les ditz Countours come a le Guyhalle. Et usee est dagarder Capias en pleyntes de dett, accompt, covenaunt, et autres accouns personelx qecouncqs.
(And it is the custom for the clerks and officers of the said Sheriffs, forthwith upon the complaint being made, to award Capias and other process against the defendants, upon testimony of sergeants deputed to the said office, as well at the said Compters at the Guildhall. And it is the custom to award Capias in complaints of debt, account, and covenant, and in all other personal actions whatsoever.)
The word wormed its way into English, first in the form of the verb to cap, which appears in a 1590 pamphlet titled Plaine Perceuall by astrologer Richard Harvey:
Speake a blooddy word in a Barbors shop, you make a forfet: and good reason too, Cap him sirra, if he pay it not. Speake a broad word or vse a grosse tearme a∣mongst huntsmen in chaze, you shall be leasht for your labor: as one that disgraceth a gentlemans pastime and game, with the termes of a heardsman.
In northern English dialect the verb became to cop. Here is a 1704 example from Edward Ward’s Dissenting Hypocrite:
Others again, like fickle Frogs,
Were weary of their Kingly Logs;
And without more ado Assaulted
Their Lawful Monarch, and Revolted:
But if the Cruel Stork should come,
He’d Tyrannize and Cop up some;
Or thro’ all Frogland cause a Croaking
Against the Doom of their Provoking.
To cop is used specifically in the sense of an arrest by a policeman in a nineteenth-century English translation of Eugène Sue’s The Mysteries of Paris:
At one o’clock in the morning I came to the Rue du Provence to hang about my lodgings, waiting until the patrol should pass, to commence my robbery, my burglary, in order to be copped!
I’m not certain of the date of this translation. I have found this passage in an 1878 translation. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), in an old entry, gives a date of 1844, but I cannot find an edition with that date. I have found an 1845 translation, however, that uses taken up instead of copped. I can’t tell if the OED is in error or if they have access to an edition that I cannot find.
In any case, there is another use of to cop meaning to be arrested by the police from the 1840s, but again there is a discrepancy in the date. Swell’s Night Guide, a guidebook to prostitution and other vices in Victorian London has this:
I means in my busines [sic], ven I pitches; and they counts me the best flag pitcher of all the shallows; and I never gets copped by the Bobbies, cos I never patters to the swells, nor the donnas; but yet I nails the browns [i.e., copper coins].
Green’s Dictionary of Slang gives this a date of 1846. The edition I found online is from 1849.
The same article in Swell’s Night Guide also uses to cop to mean to acquire:
Besides he’s been on the tramp cadge to day, and has copped a dacent swag of scran [i.e., food].
And somewhat more specific than to acquire, the verb can also mean to steal. From an Octboer 1879 article in Macmillan’s Magazine:
Some time afterwards I was taken by two pals (companions) to an orchard to cop (steal) some fruit, me being a mug (inexperienced) at the game.
And by the early twentieth century, someone copped by the police for copping fruit could cop a plea, meaning to strike a plea bargain. From the New York Times of 15 September 1921:
The break between Brindell and Stadtmuller came when the latter refused to “cop a plea of guilty” at the dictation of Brindell, who is said to have declared he had “it all fixed” for Stadtmuller to get a light sentence.
And while most would not associate copping a feel with the criminal underworld, that phrase is first recorded in Albin Pollock’s 1935 glossary of criminal slang:
Cop a feel, a presumptuous man, who will not let his hands behave when with an attractive girl.
And there is this New York Times review of Woody Allen’s 1972 film Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* But Were Afraid to Ask that shows by that late date the phrase had fully transitioned out of underworld slang to the pages of respectable newspapers:
On the whole, Allen's approach is based on the pseudo-sophisticated notion prevalent among many New York reviewers that once sex is verbalized it no longer has to be visualized. Say a dirty word and you're striking a blow for freedom of speech, but show a dirty picture and you're peddling pornography—not that Allen is here in the vanguard of permissiveness, even linguistically, His locution "cops a feel," for example, is strictly Flatbush fifties.
Okay, so we’ve had a run-down of the verb to cop, but where does the noun meaning policeman come in? Copper is in place by the 1830s, as shown in this example from Renton Nicholson’s Cockney Adventures and Tales of London Life of 3 February 1838:
“Do it at vonce, else the coppers ’ill come,” said he of the short pipe.
So, a copper is one who cops.
It is clipped to just cop by 1859, when it appears in a satirical poem in George W. Matsell’s Vocabulum; or, the Rogues Lexicon. The poem uses the traditional Ubi sunt (where have they gone) motif:
Oh! where will be the culls of the bing
A hundred stretches hence?
The bene morts, who sweetly sing,
A hundred stretches hence?
The autum-cacklers, autum-coves
The jolly blade who wildly roves;
And where the buffer, bruiser, blowen,
And all the cops and beaks so knowin’,
A hundred stretches hence?
Despite the word’s straightforward etymology, various spurious etymologies have arisen. It’s not an acronym for Constable on Patrol, nor does it have anything to do with copper buttons on police uniforms. It quite simply comes from a policeman’s power to arrest, or cop, criminals.
Sources:
Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2014, s.v. cape1, capias.
“Attempts to Free Bridell Aid [sic] Fail.” New York Times, 15 September 1921, 36. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
“Autobiography of a Thief in Thieves’ Language.” Macmillan’s Magazine, vol. 40. October 1879, 500. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. cop v., cop a... v, copper n.
Harvey, Richard. Plaine Perceuall the Peace-Maker of England. London: Eliot’s Court Press for G. Seton, 1590, 11. Early English Books Online.
“A Hundred Stretches Hence.” Vocabulum; or, the Rogues Lexicon, George W. Matsell, ed. New York: George W. Matsell and Co., 1859, 124.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. cap, v.2, cape, n.4, capias, n., cop, n.5, cop, v.3, copper, n.4.
The Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories. Springfield, MA: Merriam Webster, 1991. s.v. cop.
Munimenta Gildhallæ Londoniensis; Liber Albus, Liber Custumarum, et Liber Horn, vol. 1 (1859) and vol. 3 (1862). Henry Thomas Riley, ed. London: Longman, Brown, Green Longmans, and Roberts, 1859–62, 1:181, 1:199, 3:17–18. Hathi Trust Digital Library.
“Padding Kens.” Swell’s Night Guide. London: H. Smith, 1849, 66. London Low Life, Adam Matthew.
Pollock, Albin J. The Underworld Speaks. San Francisco: Prevent Crime Bureau, 1935. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Sarris, Andrew. “Everything He Thinks About Woody Allen and Isn’t Afraid to Say.” New York Times, 13 August 1972, D9. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Sue, Eugène, The Mysteries of Paris. London: George Routledge and Sons, 1873, 655. Hathi Trust Digital Library.
———, The Mysteries of Paris. Charles H. Town, translator. New York: Harper, 1843, 370. Hathi Trust Digital Library.
Ward, Edward. In Imitation of Hudibras. The Dissenting Hypocrite. London: 1704, 30. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.
Image Credit: Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion, 7 January 1854, 7.