- 1
A jape is a trick or a joke, usually with a bit of mischief in it — hiding someone’s bag, a silly prank, a line meant to make people laugh at the trick as much as the humour. It is a noun (a jape) and a verb (to jape: to joke or play tricks). It is not the everyday word. Joke and trick are what people say now. Jape sounds a little old, a little , more at home in a comic novel or a newspaper trying to sound clever than in a text to a friend. A joke can be kind and open; a jape often has a tease or a trick folded in. You will still meet it, just not on every street. Older English used it more widely for fooling people; today’s surviving sense is this lighter “trick or joke”.
惡作劇、玩笑（較舊、書面）
組成From Middle English japen, “to trick, joke, or fool people”. Where that came from is not certain. It may mix Old French japer (to bark, howl, chatter) with gaber (to mock). Scholars also point toward the same noisy family as yap, yelp, and yawp, and toward gab, but that is a perhaps, not a sure line.
原始詞典資料5 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
japenoun/d͡ʒeɪp/
- 1
A joke or quip.
- [H]e clapped hand to thigh, and laughed and laughed until the air rang again. "Oho, a jape—a jape indeed!" he roared.
- “Now I come to think of it, I suppose schooling isn't such a bad idea as long as he can have some japes and tomfoolery with his young cohorts.” “My love, it will be very good for him and very good for us.”
- 2
A prank or trick.
- In London or New York in the late 1970s dada meant what it meant in Paris and New York at the end of the First World War: a not-quite-naked prank, a jape clothed in the barest g-string of aesthetic authority, a Bronx cheer in three-part harmony, Tzara's affirmation of the right “to piss and shit in different colors.”
japeverb/d͡ʒeɪp/
- 1
To jest; play tricks.
- Now the Lond of Egypt longeth to the Soudan, yet the Soudan longeth not to the Lond of Egypt. And when I say this, I do jape with words, and may hap ye understond me not.
- 2
To mock; deride.
- 3
obsoleteTo have sexual intercourse with.
- Nay, brother, lay hand on him soon; / For he japed my wife, and made me cuckold.
- I jape a wench […] it is better to jape a wenche than to do worce.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。