Floppy describes something soft and flexible that bends or hangs loosely instead of staying stiff and upright. A puppy's floppy ears dangle and sway when it runs. A floppy hat has a wide brim that droops instead of holding its shape. When you're exhausted after a long day, you might collapse on the couch with arms hanging floppy at your sides.

The word suggests a kind of pleasant looseness, like a floppy stuffed animal that's been loved so much it's lost some of its stuffing, or a floppy pancake that's perfectly cooked and easy to fold. But floppy can also describe something that should be firm but isn't: a floppy handshake feels weak and uncertain, and floppy lettuce in the refrigerator has gone bad and lost its crispness.

Floppy can also be a noun. Older computers stored information on floppies (floppy disks), which were thin, bendable squares of plastic that you could slide into a computer. Despite being called floppy, they actually had a hard plastic shell, but the disk inside was flexible. These were common in the 1980s and 1990s before USB drives and cloud storage replaced them.