reap

Formsreaps, reaping, reaped

Pluralreaps

1. 1
   get rewardsverbtransitive

   To obtain or receive something as a reward for what one has done, whether the outcome is good or bad.

   Companies that invested early in solar power now reap large profits.

   The coach's harsh methods reaped nothing but resentment from his players.

   Similarearn, gain, receive, obtain, get

   Note

   Behind this sense stands a proverb: the King James Bible of 1611 says that whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap, and English still says you reap what you sow. The harvest can be sweet or bitter: people reap benefits and profits, or, in Milton's Samson Agonistes, "nothing but repulse and hate."

2. 2
   harvestverbtransitive

   To gather a crop, such as a harvest, by cutting it.

   The farmers raced to reap the wheat before the fall rains arrived.

   By the end of the week they had reaped the whole barley harvest from the valley fields.

   Similarharvest, gather

   Oppositesow

3. 3
   harvestverbtransitive

   To cut grain or a similar crop with a sickle, scythe or reaping machine.

   Modern combines reap and thresh the wheat in a single pass.

   The old man still reaps his small rye field with a scythe every summer.

   Similarharvest, cut, mow

   Note

   Old English rīpan lies behind the word, and further back a root meaning "to snatch"; Norwegian ripa, a cousin, means to score or scratch. Sickle, scythe or machine, the verb stays the same, and it lends its picture of cutting what has grown to the "reward" meaning.

4. 4
   grain bundlenouncountable

   A bundle of grain; a handful of cut grain laid down by the reaper as the cutting goes on.

   She gathered each reap into her arms and tied it with a twist of straw.

   By noon the field was dotted with reaps waiting to be bound into sheaves.

5. 5
   computingverbtransitive

   To terminate a child process that has already exited, so that it is removed from the process table.

   A well-written server calls waitpid() in a loop to reap any children that have exited.

   The shell reaped the finished background job before printing the next prompt.

   Note

   Programmers on Unix-like systems borrowed the harvest word for a parent process's last duty to a finished child. The parent calls wait() or waitpid(), which hands back the child's exit status and frees its slot in the process table; until then the dead child lingers as a zombie, shown as defunct. An orphan whose parent exits first is usually adopted, and reaped, by init.

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