Group

How to spell group

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce group

What does group mean?

1. nounA number of people or things gathered, classed, or considered together as a unit.
2. verbTo place or arrange people or things together as a unit.

Group in a sentence

• noun

  The tour group met outside the museum at nine.

• verb

  The spreadsheet can group the expenses by category.

• noun

  Managers split the staff into a smaller group for the workshop.

• verb

  Teachers often group pupils by ability for reading sessions.

Where does group come from?

Language of origin: French

English took this word from the French groupe in the late 1600s, a term borrowed first by painters to describe an assembly of figures arranged together in a picture. The French had in turn taken it from the Italian gruppo, meaning a cluster, knot, or bunch. That Italian word is widely thought to derive from a Germanic root related to the idea of a lump or a mass packed together, which also lies behind the English word 'crop' in its older sense of a rounded swelling. Over the 1700s the word broadened from its artistic origin to mean any collection of people or things considered as a unit, and it later gained a verb sense for the act of gathering them. The simple spelling hides a small trap, since the 'ou' sounds like the 'oo' in 'soon' rather than the more familiar 'ou' of 'house' or 'cloud'.

How the word is built

• group (a cluster or assemblage); a single unanalysable root in modern English