- an act of moving suddenly and quickly downwards through the air, as a bird does synonym dive
- swoop (on something/somebody) an act of arriving somewhere or attacking something/somebody in a way that is sudden and unexpected synonym raid
- Large quantities of drugs were found during a police swoop on the star's New York home.
Word Originmid 16th cent. (in the sense ‘sweep along in a stately manner’): perhaps a dialect variant of Old English swāpan, of Germanic origin. The early sense of the noun was ‘a blow, stroke’.
Idioms
See swoop in the Oxford Advanced American Dictionaryat/in one fell swoop
- all at the same time; in a single action, especially a sudden or violent one
- If the new law is passed, it will remove press freedom in one fell swoop.
Check pronunciation:
swoop