crop
Definitions
General English
- noun plants such as vegetables or cereals grown for food
General Science
Agriculture
- noun a plant grown for food
- noun a yield of produce from plants
- noun the bag-shaped part of a bird’s throat where food is stored before digestion
- verb to produce fruit
Food
- A chamber at the bottom of a bird’s throat in which food is stored prior to it being passed on to the gizzard for processing
Media Studies
- noun to cut down a picture to make it the correct size for use or to cut out unwanted parts of it
Publishing
- verb to cut off parts of an illustration such as a photograph
- verb to cut off too much paper when binding
Origin & History of “crop”
Old English cropp meant ‘bird’s craw’ and ‘rounded head of a plant’, and it was presumably the latter that gave rise to the word’s most familiar modern sense, ‘cultivated plant produce’, at some time in the 13th century. Its relatives in other Germanic languages, including German kropf and Dutch krop, are used for ‘bird’s craw’ but also for various bodily swellings in the throat and elsewhere, indicating the word’s underlying meaning is ‘round mass, lump’. Its Germanic ancestor, *kruppō, was borrowed into vulgar Latin as *cruppa, which made its way via Old French into English as croup ‘horse’s (round) rump’ (13th c.), and as the derivative crupper (13th c.). Croupier (18th c.) is based on French croupe, having originally meant ‘person who rides on the rump, behind the saddle’. The Germanic base *krup- ‘round mass, lump’ is also the ancestor of English group.
