Definition of "cop"

You see yourself as the kind of guy who wakes up early on Sunday morning and steps out to cop the Times and croissants.

1984, Jay McInerney, Bright Lights, Big City, page 4

He sold me a bulging paper sack full of Cambodian Red for two dolla' MPC. A strange experience, copping from a kid, but it was righteous weed.

1995, Norman L. Russell, Doug Grad, Suicide Charlie: A Vietnam War Story, page 191

Heroin appeared on the streets of our town for the first time, and Innie watched helplessly as his sixteen-year-old brother began taking the train to Harlem to cop smack.

2005, Martin Torgoff, Can't Find My Way Home, Simon & Schuster, page 10

Oh, come on. Help a brother out. People see you coppin', might inspire them. Look, I know you ain't payin' bills right now. Man must have bare peas saved up.

2023, Nathan Bryon, Tom Melia, directed by Raine Allen-Miller, Rye Lane, spoken by Nathan (Simon Manyonda)

I take no shame to fight the lame / When they deserve to cop it.

1918, Norman Lindsay, The Magic Pudding, page 34

You bust in the house, another bitch’s mouth is suckin on your man's dickWhat do you do: think straight? Or do you run to the back,Open the trunk to the nickel-plate 38?“Wait wait, baby, please!”That's the shit he's coppin when he’s down on both his knees

1992, “Straight Razor”, in Roxanne Shanté (lyrics), The Bitch Is Back

I now understand that my dad didn't really have much of a father-son relationship and may have found my behaviour hard to deal with. Maybe that is why I copped a beating.

2009, Lee Headington, Relentless, page 5

Copycat tryna cop my manner / Watch your back when you can't watch mine / Copycat tryna cop my glamor / Why so sad, bunny? Can't have mine

2017, Billie Eilish, Finneas O'Connell (lyrics and music), “Copycat”, in Don't Smile at Me, performed by Billie Eilish

He shot a guy in a bar on Martin Luther King Day and copped to first-degree manslaughter

2005, Elmore Leonard, Mr. Paradise, page 295

I said, 'Tell your tricks to call you here.'She laid the bearskin and freaked the joint off with her lights and other crap. Except for the fake stars it was a fair mock-up of her pad where I had copped her.

1967, Iceberg Slim, Pimp, published 2009, page 90

The code was to call a pimp and tell him you have his hoe plus turn over her night trap but that was bull because the HOE was out of his stable months before I copped her.

2011, Shaheem Hargrove, Sharice Cuthrell, The Rise and Fall of a Ghetto Celebrity, page 55

Cop they use to call / The tops of many hills.

1612, Michael Drayton, “(please specify the chapter)”, in [John Selden], editor, Poly-Olbion. Or A Chorographicall Description of Tracts, Riuers, Mountaines, Forests, and Other Parts of this Renowned Isle of Great Britaine, […], London: […] H[umphrey] L[ownes] for Mathew Lownes; I. Browne; I. Helme; I. Busbie, published 1613

[…] the elbow cop or coudiere for the elbow; and the rerebrace or arriere-bras for the upper arm. The shoulder cop, pauldron or epauliere which covered the shoulder, and often a large part of the breast and back, was usually considered a part of the arm guard.

2004, Kevin Grace, Tom White, Cincinnati Cemeteries: The Queen City Underground, Arcadia Publishing, page 142

In the middle was a pile of armour – breastplates, helmets, vambraces, gorgets, pauldrons, cops, cuisses, sabatons, gauntlets, all mangled and ruined, ...

2013, K. J. Parker, The Proof House, Orbit

Tilting Cuisses 457. In the 15th century the knee cops were merged in the plate cuisses. In the East, except in Japan, knee cops as separate pieces of armor were seldom used east of Turkey.

2013, George Cameron Stone, A Glossary of the Construction, Decoration and Use of Arms and Armor: in All Countries and in All Times, Courier Corporation, page 364