What does “blippa” mean in Swedish?
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A2 Swedish listening practice · Swedish · Picked for people who know a little
Blippa is the Swedish verb for “to tap” a contactless card, phone, or transit pass at a payment terminal. The word was coined onomatopoeically from the small beep the reader makes, and it’s now the standard everyday Swedish verb for the action: kan du blippa här? (“can you tap here?”), blippa kortet (“tap the card”). The verb extended from public transit (Stockholm’s SL system) into café and store payments as Sweden moved toward a near-cashless economy in the 2010s.
In this clip, a young customer buys an energy drink, shows ID at the checkout (Swedish energy drinks are age-restricted in some shops), and the cashier asks her to blippa her card. The conversation is everyday Swedish at the register.
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Source: wordfreq 3.1.1 (general) · OpenSubtitles 2018 (HermitDave) (spoken). These numbers are close, not perfect.
- ▸In Swedish supermarket and café checkouts (ICA, Coop, Espresso House)
- ▸In Swedish public-transit announcements (SL Stockholm, Skånetrafiken)
- ▸In Swedish tech and fintech ads (Klarna, Swish)
- ▸In Swedish parenting content about teaching kids to pay
- ▸In Swedish news about the cashless-economy debate