pipe [OE] The Old English word pipe goes back to Latin pipare ‘to chirp, squeak’. It first referred to a simple tube-shaped wind instrument, from which came the meanings ‘a tube used to convey water or other fluid’ [OE] and, when tobacco was first brought to Europe in the mid 16th century, ‘a device for smoking tobacco’. People have been told to put that in your pipe and smoke it, or accept what has been done, since the 1820s. In piping hot [LME], ‘very hot’, piping refers to the hissing and sizzling of food just taken from the oven or off a fire. The earliest recorded example is in The Miller’s Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer. Pipe dream meaning ‘fanciful hope’ dates from the late 19th century referring to a dream experienced when smoking an opium pipe.