to leap: to move in quick, springing bounds, whether in dancing, in play, or in a violent charge
One picture holds every use together: a body leaving the ground in quick, repeated bounds. The word does not name a style of dancing or a set of steps. It names the motion, which is why the same verb can carry a child at play, a wild goat on a ruined wall, a king before the ark, and a chariot slamming over stones.
That is also why the poets reach for it when the land itself reacts to God. In Psalm 114 the mountains leap like rams and the hills like lambs as Israel comes out of Egypt, and in Psalm 29 the voice of the LORD sets Lebanon bounding like a calf. The comparison is deliberate. Solid ground behaves like a startled young animal.
When Chronicles retells the day David brought the ark into Jerusalem, it uses this verb of the king, pairing it with the word for laughing and making merry (שָׂחַק) where the older account in 2 Samuel has a different pair, one for whirling (כָּרַר) and one for springing about (פָּזַז). The scene is the same, and so is the physical energy.
At the far end of the range the leaping turns hostile. Nahum hears a war chariot jolting through the streets of a doomed city, and Joel watches an unstoppable force bound over the mountaintops with the rumble of chariots. Nothing joyful is left, only the violent bounce of something coming fast.