crop

SayKROP/kɹɑp/UK/kɹɒp/

24 meanings of crop

1
nouncountable
A plant grown to be harvested for food, livestock feed, fuel, or another economic purpose.
Cotton remains the most profitable crop on the family's land.
Farmers rotate their crops to keep the soil healthy.
Note
Old English crop covered things a modern reader keeps apart: the top of a plant, an ear of corn, a bunch of flowers, even a bird's craw. The farm sense names the kind of plant, such as barley, oats, cotton or maize. That makes it countable: farmers choose a crop and rotate their crops. How much of it comes in is the season's yield.
2
nouncountable
The amount of produce harvested in a particular season or year, especially from plants.
The coffee crop fell sharply after an unusually dry summer.
Vineyards across the valley reported an excellent grape crop this year.
Similarharvest, yield
3
verbtransitive
To remove the outer parts of a photograph or image, usually to frame the subject better.
Crop the image so the horizon sits a third of the way up.
He cropped the screenshot to show only the relevant text.
Similartrim, cut
Note
The cut that trims a picture rather than shrinking it. An instruction like "Reduce to six inches wide and crop to eight inches high" keeps the two jobs apart. Reducing scales the whole image; cropping cuts part of it away. The verb takes to plus a size, or for plus a purpose: crop for emphasis and composition.
4
verbtransitive
To cut something short, especially hair or an animal's tail or ears.
Soldiers often crop their hair short for convenience.
The groom cropped the pony's mane before the show.
Similartrim, clip, cut, shear, dock
5
verbtransitive
To remove the upper end of something, particularly a plant.
Gardeners crop the leading shoots to encourage side growth.
She cropped the tops of the basil plants to delay flowering.
Similartop, trim, prune, lop
Note
The verbs have their own line: Middle English croppen, "to cut, pluck and eat", with cognates such as Scots crap and Icelandic kroppa, "to cut, crop, pick". Topping is the core image, and it pairs readily with off. The King James Bible of 1611 has "I will crop off from the top of his young twigs a tender one." Crop off puts the stress on the piece removed.
6
nounfigurativelycountable
A batch of similar people or things that arrive or emerge at about the same time.
The latest crop of smartphones offers little real innovation.
A new crop of young writers is reshaping the magazine.
Similarbatch, group, wave, generation, set
Note
A figurative harvest: people or ideas that turn up together, as if they had ripened in the same season. It almost always comes in the frame a crop of, with an adjective that marks the batch: a fresh crop of internet talent, a whole crop of ideas, an exceptional crop of graduates. The word quietly compares one group with earlier and later ones, which is why new, latest and fresh sit so naturally before it.
7
nouncountable
A hairstyle in which the hair is cut very short, close to the head.
A neat crop suited the sharp lines of her face.
He asked the barber for a tight crop.
Note
A hairstyle named for being short, and the base of named styles such as the Eton crop. Thomas Pynchon, in Mason & Dixon (1997), has a character clap a wig over his "ascetic's Crop", which catches the word's plain, close-cut feel. It is the noun answering the verb for cutting hair short: you crop hair, and you end up with a crop.
8
nouncountable
A photograph or image that has been trimmed by removing its outer parts.
This crop removes the distracting buildings in the background.
The editor preferred a square crop for the cover.
Note
A word from the print shop long before it was a word from the screen. Harry Appleton Groesbeck Jr., writing in 1924 on preparing copy for engravers, advised marking the position for the crop, or some essential feature might be cut off. The noun can name the planned cut or the trimmed picture that results, and adjectives describe its shape and tightness: a square crop, a tight crop.
9
verbtransitive
To mow, reap, or gather a harvest from the land.
Villagers crop the barley by hand in the highland fields.
They cropped the meadow grass for winter feed.
Similarreap, harvest, mow, gather
10
nouncountable
A short, rigid whip, especially one used in horse-riding.
She raised her crop but never actually struck the horse.
A well-balanced crop helps a jockey signal without losing grip.
Similarwhip
Note
The whip as a whole object, short and stiff, as distinct from the lashing end of a whip. In riding talk it usually appears as riding crop or hunting crop, and bat names the same short whip. The verb to strike with one is built straight on this noun, so a rider who crops a horse is using exactly this tool.

11
verbintransitive
Of a plant or piece of land, to produce a harvest.
The vines cropped abundantly after the wet spring.
Some varieties crop earlier than others.
Similaryield, produce, bear, fruit
Note
An intransitive use with the plant or the land as subject: vines crop well, and some varieties crop early. Adverbs of amount and timing do most of the work. Turn it around and the farmer becomes the subject, with the field as object. That is its causative partner, as in to crop a field.
12
nouncountable
A pouch-like part of the digestive tract of some birds and other animals, used to store food before digestion.
The hen's crop was swollen with the grain she had eaten.
Pigeons produce a milky secretion in the crop to feed their chicks.
Similarcraw
Note
The anatomist's word for a bird's food pouch, with craw as its synonym. The crop sits on the way down. Arthur Conan Doyle has a stone pass along a bird's gullet and down into its crop. Writers reach for it when birds are full. George MacDonald's nestlings have filled their little crops, and Elizabeth Royte's vultures (2015) settle with bulging crops.
13
nouncountable
The lashing end of a whip, the part that delivers the blow.
The crop whistled past the horse's flank without touching it.
Years of use had stiffened the leather crop on his coachman's whip.
Similarlash, thong
14
verbtransitive
To make a piece of land produce a harvest of plants.
Tenant farmers crop the hillside terraces with maize and beans.
They have cropped that valley with the same grain for decades.
Similarcultivate, farm, plant, till
15
nounslanguncountableplural
Cannabis, grown and used as a recreational or medicinal drug.
He passed the crop around as the music played late into the night.
Police seized several ounces of crop during the raid on the house.
Similarweed, pot, grass, cannabis, marijuana
Note
Street slang that lives in the plural. Cypress Hill's "Insane in the Brain" (1993) has police coming to seize the rapper's crops. The plural is the signal: a singular crop in most sentences will be heard as the farm word. It belongs to slang and song, not to neutral or formal writing about cannabis.
16
nouncountable
The exposed surface portion of a mineral vein or seam where it reaches the ground.
Surveyors mapped the crop where the vein broke through the surface.
The ore crop ran in a clear line along the exposed cliff face.
Similaroutcrop, outcropping
Note
Where a rocky outcrop is any rock breaking the surface, this is the miner's version. It is a vein, lode or seam showing at ground level, the visible start of a deposit. The crop marks the line miners trace to follow the deposit downward, which is why it gets surveyed and mapped rather than simply noticed.
17
nouncountable
A mass of rock that projects above the surrounding surface.
Hikers rested on the granite crop overlooking the valley below.
A weathered crop jutted from the hillside just above the trail.
Similaroutcrop, crag, ledge
18
nouncountable
The action of cutting or trimming something short.
The editor's crop of the photograph focused attention on the subject.
A tight crop of the footage trimmed away the empty opening seconds.
Similartrim, cut
19
nouncountable
A group of small blisters at the same stage of development over the course of a disease.
Chickenpox produces successive crops of vesicles over several days.
The latest crop emerged along the patient's torso this morning.
Similarcluster, outbreak
20
nounarchaic
Any of several plant tops: a flower head, especially a picked one, an ear of corn, or a tree's highest branches.
The girl filled her basket with a crop of fresh daisies.
Birds nested in the leafy crop of the towering elm.
Note
Here the Old English meaning survives: the top of a growing thing, whether a picked flower head, an ear of corn or the crown of a tree. It belongs to older writing and regional speech, so a modern reader will hear "harvest" first. If you use it, let the context make the top-of-the-plant meaning plain, as in the leafy crop of an elm.
21
verbtransitive
To strike a person or animal with a riding whip.
She cropped the stubborn pony lightly across the flank.
Cruel drivers crop their horses to force them onward.
Similarwhip, lash, flog
Note
The verb can describe a rider's signal as much as a blow. Mary Hart Perry's Seducing the Princess (2013) has a rider who "cropped the horse into a comfortable canter". The pattern crop a horse into a pace treats the whip as a cue to the horse rather than a punishment. Without a phrase like that, the verb reads as plain striking.
22
nouncountable
An entire oxhide, taken and worked as a single piece.
The leatherworker selected a thick crop for the heavy harness.
Several crops lay stacked and salted in the curing shed.
Similarhide
23
nouncountable
Tin ore that has been dressed and prepared for smelting.
The dressed crop was carried up to the smelting house.
Each crop of tin was assayed before it entered the furnace.
Note
Tin ore at the end of dressing rather than in the ground: cleaned of waste rock and brought to a grade fit for the furnace. Mining talk has a second meaning, a seam showing at the surface, so context decides. A crop that is assayed or smelted is ore. A crop that is mapped or followed is rock still in place.
24
nouncountable
The carved, leaf-like portion of a finial, the ornament crowning a spire or gable.
The mason restored the worn crop atop the cathedral's tallest finial.
Each crop was carved with delicate, curling oak leaves.
Note
An architectural term for the carved leaves on a finial, the ornament that crowns a pinnacle, gable or canopy. The finial is the whole terminal; the crop is only its leafy part. That is why a mason can restore the crop while leaving the rest of the finial alone. The term echoes the word's old meaning of a plant's top, here set in stone.

Practice

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Origins

Meanings 1–2, 6–8, 10, 12–13, 15–20, 22–24

From Middle English crop, from Old English crop, cropp meaning the head or top of a plant, a sprout, a cluster of flowers, or the craw of a bird. It comes from Proto-West Germanic *kropp and Proto-Germanic *kruppaz ('body, trunk, crop'), from a Proto-Indo-European root *grewb- ('to warp, bend, crawl'). It is related to Dutch krop and German Kropf, and is a doublet of 'group' and 'croup'.

Meanings 3–5, 9, 11, 14, 21

From Middle English croppen ('to cut, pluck and eat'), from Old English *croppian. It literally means to take off the crop (the top, head, or ear) of a plant, and is related to Dutch kroppen and Icelandic kroppa ('to cut, crop, pick'). See Etymology 1.