A pippin is a kind of apple, typically a small sweet one. The most famous is Cox’s Orange Pippin, a British apple with a rich taste that cooks and gardeners still praise by name. The word is old. It comes from an old French word for a seed — the little pip inside the fruit. First it meant the seed, then an apple raised from a seed, and later a named kind of apple. You still see it on fruit boxes and in recipes, though actually in many shops people now just say Cox and drop pippin. Older English could call a person a pippin meaning a fine one, the way you might call someone a peach; that use is rare now and a bit playful.