gape

verb

1. (intransitive)To open the mouth wide, especially involuntarily, as in a yawn, anger, or surprise.

   “1723, Jonathan Swift, The Journal of a Modern Lady, 1810, Samuel Johnson, The Works of the English Poets, from Chaucer to Cowper, Volume 11, page 467, She stretches, gapes, unglues her eyes, / And asks if it be time to rise;”

   “Eustace gaped at him in amazement. When his urbanity dropped away from him, as now, he had an innocence of expression which was almost infantile. It was as if the world had never touched him at all.”

2. (intransitive)To stare in wonder.

   “Home I vvould go, / But that my Dores are hatefull to my eyes. / Fill'd and damm'd up vvith gaping Creditors, / VVatchfull as Fovvlers vvhen their Game vvill ſpring; […]”

   “The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play.”

   “Brother Francine demands stronger rules, damns the needs of the body, and then sneaks off to a public pool to gape obscenely at the casually exposed flesh.”

3. (intransitive)To open wide; to display a gap.

   “The wound was gaping open and losing too much blood.”

   “May that ground gape, and swallow me alive, / Where I shall kneel to him who slew my father!”

   “Nor is he deterr'd from the belief of the perpetual flying of the Manucodiata, by the gaping of the feathers of her wings, (which seem thereby less fit to sustain her body) but further makes the narration probable by what he has observed in Kites hovering in the Aire, as he saith, for a whole hour together without any flapping of their wings or changing place.”

   “The hungry grave for her due tribute gapes:”

4. (intransitive)To open the passage to the vomeronasal organ, analogous to the flehming in other animals.
5. To depict a dilated anal or vaginal cavity upon penetrative sexual activity.

noun

1. (countable, uncommon, uncountable)An act of gaping; a yawn.

   “Now a gen'ral gape goes round, And vapours cloud each sleepy head.”

2. (countable, uncountable)A large opening.
3. (uncountable)A disease in poultry caused by gapeworm in the windpipe, a symptom of which is frequent gaping.
4. (countable, uncountable)The width of an opening.
5. (countable, uncountable)The maximum opening of the mouth (of a bird, fish, etc.) when it is open.