Ypres is a small town in the west of Belgium, in the Flemish part of the country. In Dutch, which is what people there actually speak, the town is called Ieper; Ypres is the French name, and that is the name English uses.

The reason an English learner meets this word at all is the First World War. Three huge battles were fought around Ypres between 1914 and 1918. The town sat at the edge of the land the German army held, and both sides pushed at it for four years. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers died there, and after all that dying neither side had really gained anything. The third battle is often called Passchendaele, and it is remembered for mud so deep that men and horses drowned in it. The town itself was shelled until almost nothing was standing; it was rebuilt after the war, carefully, to look as it had before.

British soldiers could not say the French name, so they called the place Wipers. That nickname is famous — there was even a soldiers' newspaper called the Wipers Times. It tells you something about those soldiers: they were living in a horror, and they made a joke out of the name of it.

Today Ypres is quiet, and known for remembering. Every evening at eight o'clock, buglers play the Last Post under the Menin Gate, a stone arch carved with the names of tens of thousands of soldiers whose bodies were never found. They have done this nearly every night since 1928.