Hop
1. When referring to a network, hops are the amount of connections in-between the source and destination. With the traceroute command, any user can see how many hops it takes to reach a destination. As can be seen in the below example, to connect from an example computer to Computer Hope it took three hops; traceroute displayed each of the servers, routers, and their response time for each hop.
| 1 | 169 ms | 190 ms | 160 ms | slc1-tc.xmission.com [166.70.1.20] |
| 2 | 159 ms | 160 ms | 190 ms | cisco0-tc.xmission.com [166.70.1.1] |
| 3 | 165 ms | 189 ms | 159 ms | www.computerhope.com [166.70.10.23] |
2. In IRC, a HOP is short for Half OP and is a user that doesn't have every right, but does have the ability to kick, ban, voice, and change topic.
Also see: AOP, IRC, Trace, Traceroute, Network definitions, Op