groop
English
Etymology 1
From Middle English grope, grupe, groupe, from Old English grōp (“ditch”), from Proto-Germanic *grōpō (“furrow, ditch, trench”), from Proto-Indo-European *gʰreb-, *gʰrebʰ- (“to dig, furrow, scratch”). Cognate with Scots gruip (“gutter, drain, ditch, trench”), North Frisian groop (“pit”), Dutch groep (“a trench, moat”), Swedish grop (“a pit, ditch, hole, hollow”), Old English grēp, grēpe (“land-drain, ditch; furrow; burrow; privy”). More at grip, groove.
Alternative forms
- grupe, groap, grube
Noun
groop (plural groops)
- (obsolete or Britain dialectal, Northern England, Scotland) A trench or small ditch.
- (obsolete or Britain dialectal, Northern England, Scotland) A trench or drain; particularly, a trench or hollow behind the stalls of cows or horses for receiving their dung and urine.
- 1816, James Cleland, Annals of Glasgow, Digitized edition, published 2007, page 373:
- The groop is one foot six inches wide, six and one-half inches deep at one end … to carry off the urine into a reservoir under the Cowhouse, …
- 2008, Dennis O'Driscoll, Seamus Heaney, Stepping stones:
- Cleaning the byre involved barrowing out the contents of the groop, sluicing it down and rebedding it with clean straw.
-
- (obsolete or Britain dialectal, Northern England, Scotland) A pen for cattle; a byre.
Verb
groop (third-person singular simple present groops, present participle grooping, simple past and past participle grooped)
- (obsolete) To make a channel or groove; to form grooves.
Etymology 2
Alteration of group. More at group.
Noun
groop (plural groops)
- Alternative form of group
- 1828, William Taylor, Historic Survey of German Poetry (Treuttel and Würtz, Treuttel Jun. and Richter), Digitized edition, published 2007, page 179:
- Revival of Fine Literature — Swiss groop of Poets ...
- 1834, Charles Augustus Davis, Letters of J. Downing, Major, Harper & Brothers, page 158:
- … and laid his Hickory and hat down afore him, and all our folks began to nock noses in little groops here and there;
- 1985, Thomas Beth, Dieter Jungnickel, Hanfried Lenz, Design Theory (Mathematics), Digitized edition, Bibliographisches Institut, published 2010, →ISBN, page 560:
- Delete one point x and consider as new groops the point sets B\\{x} where B is any block of D containing x.
- 2004, Dept. of Combinatorics and Optimization, Ars Combinatoria, Volumes 72-73 (Mathematics), University of Waterloo, page 90:
- A groop divisible design on v points with groop size g and block size k is called a t-GD[k,g,;v] if every subset of t distinct points that contains no two points from the same groop is contained in exactly one block.
-
Verb
groop (third-person singular simple present groops, present participle grooping, simple past and past participle grooped)
- Alternative form of group
- 1810, Alexander Chalmers, Samuel Johnson, editor, The works of the English poets, from Chaucer to Cowper, Digitized edition, published 2006, page 485:
- I GROOPED in thy pocket pretty peate.
- 1829, The Battle of Navarino: Or the Renegade, Digitized edition, published 2010, page 40:
- Grooped around the fires on which they were preparing their provisions, …
-
References
- groop in An American Dictionary of the English Language, by Noah Webster, 1828.
- groop in The Century Dictionary, New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911.