Crop

How to spell crop

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce crop

What does crop mean?

1. nounA cultivated plant or its yield gathered from the land in a single season.
2. verbTo cut off or trim part of something, especially the top, edges, or excess.
3. nounA fresh group or quantity of people or things appearing together.

Crop in a sentence

• noun

  The wheat crop failed after weeks of drought.

• verb

  You can crop the photo to remove the cluttered background.

• noun

  This year's crop of graduates entered a tough job market.

• noun

  Farmers rotate each crop to keep the soil healthy.

• verb

  The barber agreed to crop his hair short for the summer.

• noun

  The new crop of recruits begins training on Monday.

Where does crop come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Crop comes from the Old English word cropp, which originally meant the rounded head or top of a plant and also the pouchlike swelling in a bird's gullet where food is held before digestion. Both meanings shared the underlying idea of a rounded lump or cluster, and the plant sense gradually broadened so that by the Middle Ages crop referred to the entire yield of grain or produce gathered from a field. The verb sense, meaning to cut off the top of something, grew naturally from the noun, since harvesting and trimming both involve removing the upper growth; this is why we now crop hair, crop a photograph, and crop a field. Close Germanic relatives survive in Dutch and German words for a bird's craw and for a stout body, and the same root lies behind croup, the swelling sense, and arguably the modern look of words like crouch. Because the word is short, native, and phonetically regular, its spelling has stayed remarkably stable for over a thousand years.

How the word is built

• crop (whole root; from Old English cropp meaning the head or top of a plant, and the rounded pouch in a bird's throat)