a1475 Bk. Curtasye (Sloane 1986) l. 446 in Babees Bk. (2002) i. 313 With crochettis and loupys sett on lyour.

1513 G. Douglas tr. Virgil Æneid v. v. 66 The todir part [of a snake cut in two] lamyt, clynschis and makis hir byde, In lowpis thrawin and lynkis of hir hyde.

1530 J. Palsgrave Lesclarcissement 241/1 Loupe to holde a button, fermeau.

c1540 (?a1400) Destr. Troy 2806 Paris with pyne, & his pure brother,..Lauset loupis fro the le; lachyn in Ancres.

1551 Bible (Matthew's) Exod. xxvi. 4 Then shalt thou make loupes of Iacyncte coloure, alonge by the edge of y^e one curtayne.

1657–8 in H. J. F. Swayne Churchwardens' Accts. Sarum (1896) 332 A Crooke and Loope to put y^e Sword in, 2s. 6d.

1669 S. Sturmy Mariners Mag. v. xii. 49 There is a Brass Pin in the Center at C for to hang the Plummet and String, with the Lope upon.

a1685 M. Evelyn Fop-dict. 21 in Mundus Muliebris (1690) Sultane, a Gown trimm'd with Buttons, and Loops.

1718 Lady M. W. Montagu Let. 10 Mar. (1965) I. 381 Those gold loops so common upon birth-day Coats.

1782 H. Walpole Vertue's Anecd. Painting (ed. 3) V. 118 A woman..in..a cloak with loops hanging behind.

1782 W. Cowper John Gilpin 103 The cloak did fly..Till, loop and button failing both, At last it flew away.

1802 C. James New Mil. Dict. Loop, is..used to signify an ornamental part of a regimental hat.

1815 M. Elphinstone Acct. Kingdom Caubul ii. ix. 269 There are rows of buttons and loops down the breast of the tunic.

1879 S. H. Butcher & A. Lang tr. Homer Odyssey 73 And fixed the oars in leathern loops all orderly.

1890 J. P. Ballard Among Moths & Butterflies 120 A loop-and-link as if he had begun to make a chain.

1891 W. C. Sydney Eng. 18th Cent. II. 110 So late as 1799..footmen wore their hair tied up behind in a thick loop called a hoop.

1880 L. S. Floyer Plain Hints Examiners Needlework 93 To speak correctly, we believe it can be proved that we should speak of a mesh in netting, a loop in knitting.

1882 S. F. A. Caulfeild & B. C. Saward Dict. Needlework 328/2 Loop. A term used instead of stitch in Crochet, Knitting, Netting, and Tatting. In Lace-making the word Loop is sometimes employed instead of Picot.

1883 W. S. Gresley Gloss. Terms Coal Mining It [the D Link] is a loop in which one man is lowered and raised in an engine~pit.

1891 Labour Commission Gloss. Loops, slings attached to the end of the ropes which formerly drew the corves to the pit-mouth of a coal mine.

1897 Westm. Gaz. 13 May 7/1 There were about 200 men in the pit, who had to be brought out by another shaft in loops.

1901 Brit. Med. Jrnl. No. 2089 (Epitome) 8 A loop of this second dilution is placed..on each cover glass.

1907 S. E. White Arizona Nights (U.K. ed.) i. v. 93 Some few whirled the loop, but most cast it with a quick flip.

1933 Amer. Speech Feb. 28/2 Hondo, a small loop made of metal or rawhide to prevent the rope from burning or cutting the hands and to hold the loop open.

1970 G. R. Stewart Amer. Place-names 264/1 Loop Texas: so called because the postmaster-to-be, at the time of suggesting a name, was playing with the loop of his lasso.

1944 Living off Land: Man. Bushcraft vii. 138 Knots..nooses (or loops).

1846 Toynbee in Medico-chirurg. Trans. XXIX. 309 Loops, convolutions, and dilatations, freely intercommunicating, characterize the tubuli of the surface.

1858 H. Gray Anat. 442 Occasionally the elementary [nerve-] fibres are disposed in terminal loops or plexuses.

1885 W. Stirling tr. L. Landois Text-bk. Human Physiol. II. 518 The spiral tubule..passes into the descending portion of Henle's loop.

1854 S. P. Woodward Man. Mollusca ii. 211 In Terebratula and Thecidium it [sc. the internal skeleton] takes the form of a loop, which supports the brachial membrane, but does not strictly follow the course of the arms.

1860 L. Reeve Elem. Conchol. II. 182 In Terebratula dilatata..the loops are long.

1881 P. M. Duncan in Academy 19 Mar. 210 The comparative sizes are also given, and the internal skeleton or loop also.

1858 J. Booth in Proc. Royal Soc. 9 261 The difference between the lengths of the loop and the infinite branch is equal to an arc of the parabola together with a right line.

1877 W. K. Clifford in Math. Papers (1882) 243 A path going along any line from O to very near A, then round A in a very small circle, and then back to O along the same line, will be called a loop.

1891 J. Wolstenholme Math. Probl. (ed. 3) 322 Also prove that the area of the loop is [etc.].

1878 Ld. Rayleigh Theory of Sound §255 II. 46 Midway between each pair of consecutive nodes there is a loop, or place of no pressure variation.

1878 Ld. Rayleigh Theory of Sound §255 II. 46 The loops are the places of maximum velocity, and the nodes those of maximum pressure variation.

1879 W. H. Stone Sound i. 9 The breaking-up of the string into a number of nodes with intervening loops or ventral segments.

1900 Sci. Amer. 22 Sept. 186/1 [The car] plunges down the incline of 75 feet,..whirls round the loop, and reaches the station after running up a heavy grade.

1913 Aeroplane 25 Sept. 350/2 M. Pégoud succeeded in looping the loop completely.

1914 Aeroplane 12 Mar. 284/2 Mr. Hucks..first flew his two-seater, and later on the ‘looper’ at 700 feet, made one loop.

1923 Cosmopolitan Apr. 84/1 It took Hurricane Sherlock just two boisterous rounds to smite 12-Punch O'Bernstein ‘for a loop’, as Hurricane put it.

1936 J. G. Brandon Pawnshop Murder v. 46 Something had happened which had knocked even the imperturbable Wibley for the loop.

1968 J. Wainwright Web of Silence 126 Have you lost your marbles, Pewter?.. Have you gone for a complete loop?

1969 E. Ambler Intercom Conspiracy (1970) vi. 110 I was really confused. That memorandum threw me for a loop.

1971 Country Life 18 Feb. 374/2 It was over Tewkesbury that I pointed my nose at the Mill and did my first loop.

1973 D. Ramsay Deadly Discretion 153 That little charade of hers had knocked him for a loop.

1869 H. E. Vandervell & T. M. Witham Syst. Figure-skating x. 187 The Large Loop. This being done entirely on one edge throughout, requires some medium degree of speed.

1901 Encycl. Sport IV. 370/1 Loops are of three kinds—the ordinary variety, the turn loop, and the bracket loop.

1935 Encycl. Sports, Games & Pastimes 560/1 ‘Loop’ is effected by over-balancing the body and recovering equilibrium by a quick turn of the foot.

1962 T. D. Richardson Art of Figure Skating vii. 60 Loops are not skated in the normal positions..and what is more, they require an entirely different timing.

1973 Times 7 Feb. 15/8 Hoffmann was fourth in the rocker but skated the best loops.

1880 H. Faulds in Nature 28 Oct. 605/1 The right ring-finger..has an oval whorl, but the corresponding left finger shows an open loop.

1894 ‘M. Twain’ in Cent. Mag. June 235 The bewildering maze of whorls or curves or loops which constituted the ‘pattern’ of a ‘record’ stand out bold and black.

1902 Encycl. Brit. XXV. 469/1 All impressions may be arranged under one of four types, namely, arches, loops, whorls, composites... Loops may be ulnar or radial.

1938 G. W. Wilton Fingerprints xvi. 78 Galton had experimented only with thumbprints, grouping his lineations into three classes of arches, loops and whorls.

1970 P. Laurie Scotl. Yard ix. 193 There are two basic finger-print patterns: loops, where the lines turn through two right angles, and triradii.

1912 F. A. Talbot Moving Pictures vii. 70 A slight loop is made at either end of the gate.

1939 D. A. Spencer & H. D. Waley Cinema To-day ii. 25 A flickering motion of these loops absorbs the difference between the steady feed of the sprocket wheels and the intermittent feed of the claw.

1962 G. A. T. Burdett Automatic Control Handbk. ix. 54 When metal strip is being wound or reeled it is usual to form loops in the feed line to allow for flexibility and avoid undue tension.

1922 R. Glazebrook Dict. Appl. Physics II. 1058/1 Before the advent of high amplification, it was impracticable to use single loops of manageable dimensions.

1936 Jrnl. Royal Aeronaut. Soc. 40 175 To obtain a full direction finding service, it is usual to instal an external circular loop which can be rotated and orientated by the operator when taking a bearing.

1966 McGraw-Hill Encycl. Sci. & Technol. (rev. ed.) I. 445/2 Use of small loops concealed within the set is a standard practice for broadcast receivers in areas where signal strength is high.

1931 K. F. Morgan in L. Cowan Recording Sound for Motion Pict. x. 151 The machine is provided with a film elevator attachment for running a continuous loop of sound track. This attachment is particularly useful for the dubbing of continuous background sounds.

1951 R. Spottiswoode Film & its Techniques xii. 355 It is most important [in dubbing]..not to upset the recording order of an emotional scene which has had to be broken down into several loops.

1959 J. Halas & R. Manvell Technique Film Animation xix. 216 Each pencil-test is shot on negative and projected in loops so that it can be viewed over and over again.

1962 A. Nisbett Technique Sound Studio 258 A tape loop may be used (a) to provide a repeated sound structure or rhythm (in radiophonics), (b) for an ‘atmosphere’ track where this is regular in quality, (c) in tape delay techniques.

1968 Punch 31 Jan. 153 At the Rank Organisation's Pinewood Studios they tell how Sophia Loren dubbed sixty-four loops in an hour and a half, against an average of ten or twelve loops an hour.

1945 L. A. MacColl Fund. Theory Servomechanisms viii. 70 This procedure of adding feedback loops to internal parts of a servomechanism is employed frequently when it is necessary to take special steps to insure that the performances of those parts shall be accurate and reliable.

1948 G. S. Brown & D. P. Campbell Princ. Servomechanisms vii. 227 Figure..shows internal loop within a main closed loop.

1954 M. H. Lajoy Industr. Automatic Controls i. 9 The automatic washing machine which operates on a time basis and is not dependent upon whether or not the clothes are clean is an open loop system.

1962 F. I. Ordway et al. Basic Astronautics ix. 366 There are two basic control systems: the open-loop system and the closed-loop system. The open-loop system is familiar to us all. Examples of this are..a light switch, or the horn button on an automobile... In the closed-loop system a portion of the output is sensed and fed back to the input. The input is then altered to achieve a co-ordinated response at the output... A good example is the modern air conditioning system in which room air is fed back to the thermostat control.

1971 J. Z. Young Introd. Study Man vii. 107 Certain cells in the hypothalamus..are very sensitive to slight rises in temperature above the normal (37°C). They then discharge nerve impulses that set in action the mechanisms that cool the body, such as sweating. This cools the blood and switches off the hypothalamus. In order to study such closed-loop feedback systems engineers use the device of ‘opening’ the loop. This has been done..by putting heating electrodes in the hypothalamus and arranging that they keep it at a constant temperature a few tenths of a degree above normal in spite of the cooling blood.

1947 H. H. Goldstine & J. Von Neumann in J. Von Neumann Coll. Wks. (1963) V. 86 When a simple induction takes place, C travels during each step of the induction over a certain path, at the end of which it returns to its beginning. Hence this path may be visualized as a loop. We will call it an induction loop or a simple induction loop.

1954 First Gloss. Programming Terminol. (Assoc. Computing Machinery) 12 Loop, the repetition of a group of instructions in a routine.

1955 R. K. Richards Arithm. Operations in Digital Computers xii. 359 Any one program may contain many loops which may interlock one another in a complex manner.

1964 C. Dent Quantity Surv. by Computer iii. 28 It will be seen that s in instruction 4 is reduced by unity at every cycle of the loop, by reason of instruction 7, and that eventually..the conditional jump instruction will decide that the number stored by instruction 5 is negative. Control then proceeds with the next sequence according to instruction 9.

1969 P. B. Jordain Condensed Computer Encycl. 294 The terminating condition test is usually the last instruction of the loop, but it may be anywhere.

1970 O. Dopping Computers & Data Processing xiv. 215 Loops..are basic to the economy of automatic data processing. It costs a few dollars to have an instruction written, but the computer executes it at a price which may be only a fraction of a cent below what the same operation would cost if it were executed by a human being. The only way of amortizing programming is to arrange for most instructions to be repeated a great number of times.

1957 New Scientist 23 May 33/1 The chemical behaviour of such systems has to be investigated in a reactor by passing a pipe containing a portion of the system under investigation through or close to the reactor core. Such a pipe, with the necessary measuring equipment, is called a test loop.

1958 H. Etherington Nucl. Engin. Handbk. v. 142 To satisfy the demand for testing operation under conditions of high temperature and pressure in those reactors using a primary water loop, high-pressure loops have been developed. Questions of fuel stability, heat transfer, water chemistry, radiation-accelerated corrosion, fission-product leakage, and fuel stability under desired operating conditions may be answered in high-pressure water loops.

1974 Times 21 Jan. 15/2 The CEGB's first two plants..would be the 52nd and 53rd of their type—the Westinghouse four-loop design, in which a single reactor is linked to four steam-generating boilers.

1974 Encycl. Brit. Macropædia XII. 897/1 Pressurized water both cools the reactor and carries away the fission-produced heat through the primary system (or loop) to a heat exchanger... The pressurized water then circulates back through the reactor in a constant cycle. In the secondary loop (which is sealed off from the radioactive primary coolant water) the water boils and expands into steam.

1962 J. Lippes in C. Tietze Intra-Uterine Contraceptive Devices 71 I wanted a device such that the muscular contractions of the uterus would not press on the entire piece of plastic but on one section at a time only... With this in mind, I designed a device which I call a ‘loop’.]

1965 Guardian 28 May 6/3 The medical council has authorized the intra-uterine contraceptive device... The IUCD would nearly always prevent pregnancy... The ‘loops’..cost only a few pence.

1967 Times 9 Oct. 4/4 [Pakistan] Although the 1970 target of 500,000 vasectomies and five million loop insertions might seem low,..the main object was to retard or halt the growing birth rate.

1971 Petticoat 17 July 6/4 There's one excellent method (the coil or loop) only suitable for someone who's already had a baby.

1974 Guardian 25 Mar. 10 Will the loop make your periods more painful? If you have comfortable periods before you have a loop fitted, you are unlikely to develop painful periods afterwards.

1949 W. F. Albright Archaeol. Palestine vi. 115 These craters were supplied with two tilted horizontal loop-handles.

1969 E. H. Pinto Treen 387 Some 19th-century planes have 17th-century type ‘loop’ handles.

1876 J. S. Ingram Centennial Exposition ix. 318 These were the larger and most important part of the exhibit, while the rest was made up of..prop nuts, loop heads, offsets and stay ends.

1888 G. M. Hopkins Poems (1967) 199 Then with loop-locks Forward falling..his twiny boots Fast he opens.

1901 L. M. Waterhouse Conduit Wiring 51 The wiring in this building has been carried out entirely on the ‘loop’ method, there being no joints in any of the wires or cables.

1869 Game Laws Illinois in Fur, Fin & Feather (1872) 175 That it shall be unlawful..to take or catch fish..by means of any seine, gill-net, tramel net, pike-net, or loop-net.

1909 Daily Mail 5 Aug. 5/2 To construct loop-roads for fast motor traffic round villages.

1960 New Left Rev. July 23/1 Loop roads for buses would penetrate some distance into the pedestrian precinct.

1963 Times 7 Mar. 7/4 Whether the town is to have a loop road or..the High Street is to be widened.

1973 ‘M. Yorke’ Grave Matters iv. ii. 76 He took the loop road that led away from the village.

1929 Times 1 Nov. 18/3 Traffic proceeding towards London is being diverted at Hatton cross roads, via Cranford-lane to the Bath road and London (A.A. loop-way).

1929 Times 1 Nov. 18/3 A.A. loop-way signs.

1699 A. Boyer Royal Dict. at Loop-lace Loop-maker, Faiseur d'Agrémens.

1896 Appletons' Pop. Sci. Monthly Feb. 535 A tendency to draw a looplike rudimentary contour soon emerges.

1870 G. Rolleston Forms Animal Life 134 We see a loop-shaped gland.

1393 W. Langland Piers Plowman C. xxi. 288 Eche chyne stoppe, þat no light leope yn at louer ne at loupe.

c1400 (?c1390) Sir Gawain & Green Knight (1940) l. 792 Wyth mony luflych loupe þat louked ful clene.

a1470 Gregory in Hist. Coll. Citizen London (Camden) 213 They hadde..loupys with schyttyng wyndowys to schute owte at.

1512 Accts. St. John's Hosp., Canterbury (Canterbury Cathedral Archives: CCA-U13/4) For makyng off a loope in þe dorter at þe susters syde vjd.

a1513 R. Fabyan New Cronycles Eng. & Fraunce (1516) II. f. ccxxv A place with a particonn atwene both prynces..made with a lowpe that eyther myght se other.

c1515 Ld. Berners tr. Bk. Duke Huon of Burdeux (1882–7) clxvi. 655 The sayd wacheman came to y^e wall syde, where as there was a strayte lope into Florence chaumbre.

1577 R. Holinshed Chron. II. 1844/1 One of them coulde not so soone looke out at a loupe [1587 loope], but three or foure were readie to salute him.

1596 T. Lodge Margarite of Amer. sig. F4 A square and curious chamber, with fine loopes to yeeld light.

1600 E. Fairfax tr. T. Tasso Godfrey of Bulloigne xi. xxxii. 201 Some at the loopes durst scant outpeepe.

1628 E. Coke 1st Pt. Inst. Lawes Eng. 5 a Tenellare or tanellare, is to make holes or loopes in walls to shoote out against the Assailants.

1797 A. Radcliffe Italian I. i. 43 Some remains of massy walls, that still exhibited loops for archers.

1846 Guide Archit. Antiq. Neighbourhood Oxford 164 On the first floor [Northleigh Ch. tower] the windows are plain Norman loops.

a1849 T. L. Beddoes Poems (1851) I. 160 A blinded loop In Pluto's madhouse' [sic] green and wormy wall.

1864 R. Browning Worst of It xii I spy the loop whence an arrow shoots.

1863 A. W. Kinglake Invasion of Crimea II. 118 Closing the loops by which a general might seek to escape from the obligation of having to make the venture.

1872 T. L. Cuyler Heart Culture 102 The soul becomes luminous, until the interior light and glow blaze out through every loop and crevice.

1837 J. Kirkbride Northern Angler 3 Loop on the dropper-flies; the tail-fly should also be looped.

1840 R. Browning Sordello ii. 199 For him was..verse..A ceremony that..looped back the lingering veil Which hid the holy place.

1843 T. Carlyle Past & Present ii. viii. 105 His frock-skirts looped over his elbow.

1844 Hood's Mag. May 415 Loop up her tresses Escaped from the comb.

1853 Mechanics' Mag. 58 375 Each needle carries a separate thread, which are looped into each other alternately.

1863 H. Alford Let. 8 Dec. in Life, Jrnls. & Lett. (1873) x. 366 Their narrow..streets, shady and lofty, looped together with frequent arches from side to side.

1873 W. Black Princess of Thule ii. 28 She had an abundance of dark hair looped up.

1880 N. Smyth Old Faiths in New Light (1882) v. 208 Every thread of life is inextricably looped with a thousand other threads.

1881 Encycl. Brit. XIII. 99/1 The basal processes loop with the horizontal fibres.