crop

Concise Oxford English Dictionary © 2008 Oxford University Press:
crop/krɒp/

▶noun

• 1 a plant cultivated on a large scale for food or other use, especially a cereal, fruit, or vegetable.

  ■ an amount of a crop harvested at one time.

• 2 an amount of related people or things appearing at one time: the current crop of politicians.

• 3 a hairstyle in which the hair is cut very short.

• 4 a riding crop or hunting crop.

• 5 a pouch in a bird's gullet where food is stored or prepared for digestion.

• 6 the entire tanned hide of an animal.

▶verb (crops, cropping, cropped)

• 1 cut (something, especially a person's hair) very short.

  ■ (of an animal) bite off and eat the tops of (plants).

  ■ trim off the edges of (a photograph).

• 2 harvest (a crop) from an area.

  ■ sow or plant (land) with plants that will produce a crop.

  ■ (of land or a plant) yield a harvest.

• 3 (crop up) appear or occur unexpectedly.

• 4 (crop out) (of rock) appear or be exposed at the surface of the earth.

word history: The word crop has a complex history. In Old English it meant ‘pouch in a bird's gullet’ (modern sense 5) and ‘flower head, ear of corn’ (now obsolete); this latter sense gave rise to sense 1 and to other senses referring to the top of something, from which came its application to the upper part of a whip and so to its use to refer to short whips in hunting crop and riding crop. Crop shares a Germanic root with German, Dutch, and Scandinavian words signifying something protruding, swollen, or bunched together; it is also related to group, and to croup ‘rump or hindquarters of a horse’.