Where does the word COP come from?]
[“Cop” has long existed as a verb meaning “to take or seize”, but it didn’t begin to make the linguistic shifts necessary to turn it into a casual term for “police officer” until the mid-19th century. The first example of ‘cop’ taking the meaning “to arrest” appeared in 1844, and the word then swiftly moved from being solely a verb for “take into police custody” to also encompassing a noun referring to the one doing the detaining.
