Pulp is the soft, wet, mashed-up material inside something. When you bite into an orange, the juicy parts you eat are the pulp. After you squeeze oranges to make juice, the stringy bits left behind are also pulp. Paper is made from wood pulp: manufacturers grind up trees, mix the fibers with water to create a mushy substance, then press and dry it into sheets.

The word can also describe cheap fiction magazines printed on rough, low-quality paper in the early 1900s. These pulp magazines featured exciting stories about detectives, adventures, science fiction, and superheroes. Writers like Ray Bradbury got their start by publishing stories in the pulps.

Today, people still use “pulp fiction” to mean any exciting, action-packed story that's fun to read even if it's not serious literature. When something gets pulped, it means it's been crushed or mashed into pulp.