Cropping

How to spell cropping

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce cropping

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cropping mean?

1. verbCutting away the unwanted outer parts of something, especially trimming the edges of a photograph or image.
2. verbGrowing or harvesting plants on a piece of land for produce.

Cropping in a sentence

• She spent the afternoon cropping the holiday photos to remove the busy background.

• The family had been cropping that field with barley for three generations.

• Cropping the header image to a tighter ratio made the whole page look cleaner.

• Rotating which crops they were cropping each season kept the soil healthy.

Where does cropping come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The base word 'crop' descends from the Old English 'cropp', which originally meant the rounded top or head of a plant, and also the swollen pouch in a bird's throat where food is stored. From naming the topmost part of a plant, the sense widened to cover the produce gathered from a field, and then to the verb meaning to cut off the top of something, as grazing animals bite off the heads of grass. That cutting sense is why modern English speaks of cropping a photograph, cropping hair, or cropping a hedge. The doubled p in 'cropping' is the regular English rule at work: a short stressed vowel followed by a single consonant doubles that consonant before a vowel suffix, so 'crop' becomes 'cropping' rather than 'croping'. The word has close Germanic relatives, including the Dutch 'krop' and German 'Kropf' for a bird's craw, all pointing back to the same ancient root.

How the word is built

• crop (Old English cropp: top of a plant, head)
• -ing (forming the present participle and gerund); the final p doubles before the suffix because the vowel is short and stressed