• stoop •
Pronunciation: stup • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Verb
Meaning: 1. To bend downward from the waist. 2. To stand or walk with the head and upper back bent forward. 3. To lower, debase, demean oneself, descend from a superior moral position.
Notes: Today's word is authentically English, in other words, genuinely Germanic. It comes with an English adjective stoopy "having a stoop" and a personal noun, stooper "one who has a stoop". Otherwise, the present participle is used for the action noun and an alternate adjective: stooping.
In Play: 
The literal sense of today's word may be encountered in expressions like this: "Harriet is always willing to stop and stoop to smell the roses." The implication of the literal sense is downward motion, so that emerges in its figurative usage: "Most of those surrounding the president wished they had never stooped so low to get so high."
Word History: Today's Good Word is immediately unrelated to the noun stoop "small landing", borrowed from Middle Dutch stoep "a high step, threshold", which means "sidewalk, curb" today. The verb stoop comes immediately from Old English stupian "to stoop", which goes back along Germanic lines to PIE (s)teub-/(s)toub- "to bump, poke; a stick, stump", the same ultimate source as the Dutch word. It also went into the making of Sanskrit tupati "bump, push", Latin stupere "stand rigid, stunned" and stupendus "stunning, stupendous", Icelandic stubbur "stump, stub", Norwegian and Swedish stubbe "stump", and English steep, stub and nasalized stump. The noun stoop arose from the sense "stump" since stumps are flat and small. (Now a welcome home and our gratitude to our long-lost friend Dr. Margie Sved for returning and bringing today's simple but complex Good Word with her.)
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