cope

First recorded in 1300–50; Middle English coupen, from Anglo-French, Old French couper “to strike,” derivative of coup “a blow”; see origin at coup¹

The verb cope comes from Middle English coupen (also copen, coppen, caupen ) “to clash, deliver blows, engage in combat,” from Old French colper (also coper, couper ) “to strike.” The Old French verb is a derivative of the noun colp (also cop, coup ) “a blow,” from Latin colaphus “a blow with the fist, a smack on the ear.”
The spelling colaphus (with a -ph- ) shows that the Latin word is a borrowing from Greek kólaphos, and not a high-class one, either: colaphus occurs mostly in the comedies of Plautus and Terence, and in Greek kólaphos occurs only once, as a nickname for a boy’s gym trainer, in a surviving fragment of a work by the 5th-century b.c. comic playwright Epicharmus. The famed 18th-century English dictionary writer Samuel Johnson would certainly call kólaphos “a low word,” and it is a little amazing that it survived so long in Greek, then was borrowed into Latin and into Romance, and then into English.
By the mid-17th century, cope had acquired the sense “to struggle or deal on fairly even terms or with some degree of success.” The modern sense “to face and deal with responsibilities, problems, or difficulties successfully and calmly; manage” dates from the mid-1930s.

First recorded in 1175–1225; Middle English, from Medieval Latin cāpa, variant of cappa “hooded cloak”; see cap¹

First recorded in 1565–75; from French couper “to cut”; see cope¹

First recorded in 1400–50; late Middle English copen, from Low German; compare Middle Dutch côpen “to buy”