The action of moving briskly with a sharp whining, buzzing, or ripping sound; the sound itself.
Stressed as ˈzipping.
1868
The roaring of the falls and the zipping of the spiteful wind playing you a doleful march as you go.
Indianapolis Journal 27 November 6/3
1881
I heard the zipping of bullets in the air close to my head.
J. M. Batten, Reminisc. Two Years U.S. Navy 72
2010
The poem began with a sound—the zipping of a skirt, the snap of static electricity—and found its form and language from there.
Poetryvol. 196 66
Frequency
zipping typically occurs fewer than 0.01 times per million words in modern written English.
zipping is in frequency band 2, which contains words occurring between 0.001 and 0.01 times per million words in modern written English. More about OED's frequency bands
Frequency data is computed programmatically, and should be regarded as an estimate.
Frequency of zipping, n., 1870–2010
* Occurrences per million words in written English
Historical frequency series are derived from Google Books Ngrams (version 2), a data set based on the Google Books corpus of several million books printed in English between 1500 and 2010.
The overall frequency for a given word is calculated by summing frequencies for the main form of the word, any plural or inflected forms, and any major spelling variations.
For sets of homographs (distinct entries that share the same word-form, e.g. mole, n.¹, mole, n.², mole, n.³, etc.), we have estimated the frequency of each homograph entry as a fraction of the total Ngrams frequency for the word-form. This may result in inaccuracies.
Smoothing has been applied to series for lower-frequency words, using a moving-average algorithm. This reduces short-term fluctuations, which may be produced by variability in the content of the Google Books corpus.
Decade
Frequency per million words
1870
0.0004
1880
0.0005
1890
0.0007
1900
0.0007
1910
0.0011
1920
0.0011
1930
0.0013
1940
0.0015
1950
0.0019
1960
0.0023
1970
0.0031
1980
0.0037
1990
0.0042
2000
0.0048
2010
0.0053
Originally published as part of the entry for zip, v.¹