Meaning
To propose marriage - informally, abruptly, and usually with far more nerve than ceremony. The question is understood without being named, and the coy little verb carries the blush, the gulp, and the kneeling all at once. Playful and warm; nearly always reported speech - one pops the question, one does not announce the intention to. Regional use: General English.
Origin
Pop, the quick sudden verb, met the question, the unasked one, in the eighteenth century: the idiom-dictionaries record it as informal for proposing from the early 1700s, and the novelists were using it knowingly soon after. Herman Melville, in Typee (1846), marks it as already current - the mere 'popping the question', as it is termed with us; Thackeray's narrator in 1850 actually popped the question and was accepted at a Kenilworth picnic; and Trollope's character planned in 1874 to do it on the spur of the moment, the opposite of planning. Modern surveys keep it current - Newsweek in 2003 reporting that 48 percent of women would be willing to pop the question themselves - so the coy verb now cuts both ways.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- he popped the question
- popping the question
- propose the question
Usage Examples
- He popped the question at the chip shop, mid-vinegar, and she said yes before the salt.
- Six years of hints ended when she popped the question on the ferry, points over the rail.
- The registry office asked whether he was popping the question that day; he was, again, ceremonially.