cops

1. 1
   noun

   Plural of cop.

   Several cops were called in to break up the fight.

   Off-duty cops sometimes work as security guards on weekends.

   Note

   One spelling serves many nouns: whatever cop means, cops is its plural. Most readers will meet the informal police officer. The same form also counts balls of thread wound onto a spinning machine's spindle, tubes for winding silk, and dome-shaped pieces of armor at the shoulder, elbow and knee. Context settles which one is meant, and the spider and hilltop senses are obsolete. With the, it can also name the police as a body.

2. 2
   nounslang

   The police, considered together as one collective body rather than as separate officers.

   The cops cracked down hard on the neighborhood's drug trade.

   When the alarm went off, the cops were there in minutes.

   Similarpolice, fuzz

   Note

   This sense needs the article: you call the cops, or get the cops after someone. It names the whole force rather than counting individual officers, which is what the plain plural does. The usage runs from Horatio Alger's Joe the Hotel Boy (1906) to Bob Dylan's "Hurricane" (1976), where Patty calls the cops. It is slang. In careful or formal writing, the police does the same job.

3. 3
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present of cop.

   He cops an attitude the moment anyone criticizes his work.

   She often cops the best seat before the others arrive.

   Note

   Singular subjects take this form: he cops, she cops, it cops. Most of what it carries is informal taking, such as buying, grabbing, stealing or adopting. It also covers what someone is forced to take, as when a person cops the blame or the punishment. Railway enthusiasts use it as slang for seeing a locomotive for the first time. Used without an object, it can mean admitting to wrongdoing.

4. 4
   noundialectalUKcountable

   The connecting crook that joins the sections of a harrow, the tool dragged across plowed ground to break up soil.

   The blacksmith forged new cops to repair the harrow before the spring planting.

   Over the seasons, the cops on the old harrow had worked loose.

   Note

   A farmer's word from British dialect, and a separate word from the slang for police despite the identical spelling. The crook was notched, and where the pull was taken mattered: The Complete Farmer: or, a General Dictionary of Husbandry (1807) insists the true point of draught lies exactly in its center notch. Outside rural or historical writing on tillage, readers will hear the police instead.

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