To slurp is to drink or eat something wet while making a loud sucking noise — the sound of air and liquid pulled in together. You slurp soup off a spoon, slurp noodles, slurp the last inch of a drink through a straw. It is also a noun: 'he took a long slurp of tea.' The word is friendly and a little childish; the sound of the word is the sound of the thing, which is why children's books love it. Now the part worth knowing as a student in Taiwan: whether slurping is rude depends entirely on where you are. In Britain, America, and most of Europe, slurping at the table is bad manners — parents tell children to stop. In Japan, slurping ramen is normal and is often said to show you are enjoying it. Here, eating noodles with some noise is unremarkable. So when an English speaker says 'don't slurp', they are teaching a Western table rule, not stating a universal fact — and when they say 'I love slurping ramen', they are enjoying a small piece of Japan. The word also stretches a little away from food: a machine or a drain can slurp, and in computer talk, one system 'slurps up' data from another, meaning it takes in a huge amount, greedily and fast.