groop

From Middle English grope, grupe, groupe, from Old English grōp (“ditch”), from Proto-Germanic *grōpō (“furrow, ditch, trench”), from Proto-Indo-European *gʰreb-, *gʰrebʰ- (“to dig, furrow, scratch”). Cognate with Scots gruip (“gutter, drain, ditch, trench”), North Frisian groop (“pit”), Dutch groep (“a trench, moat”), Swedish grop (“a pit, ditch, hole, hollow”), Old English grēp, grēpe (“land-drain, ditch; furrow; burrow; privy”). More at grip, groove.

• grupe, groap, grube

groop (plural groops)

1. (obsolete or Britain dialectal, Northern England, Scotland) A trench or small ditch.
2. (obsolete or Britain dialectal, Northern England, Scotland) A trench or drain; particularly, a trench or hollow behind the stalls of cows or horses for receiving their dung and urine.
   • 1816, James Cleland, Annals of Glasgow‎, Digitized edition, published 2007, page 373:

     The groop is one foot six inches wide, six and one-half inches deep at one end … to carry off the urine into a reservoir under the Cowhouse, …

   • 2008, Dennis O'Driscoll, Seamus Heaney, Stepping stones:

     Cleaning the byre involved barrowing out the contents of the groop, sluicing it down and rebedding it with clean straw.

3. (obsolete or Britain dialectal, Northern England, Scotland) A pen for cattle; a byre.

groop (third-person singular simple present groops, present participle grooping, simple past and past participle grooped)

1. (obsolete) To make a channel or groove; to form grooves.

Alteration of group. More at group.

groop (plural groops)

1. Alternative form of group
   • 1828, William Taylor, Historic Survey of German Poetry‎ (Treuttel and Würtz, Treuttel Jun. and Richter), Digitized edition, published 2007, page 179:

     Revival of Fine Literature — Swiss groop of Poets ...

   • 1834, Charles Augustus Davis, Letters of J. Downing, Major‎, Harper & Brothers, page 158:

     … and laid his Hickory and hat down afore him, and all our folks began to nock noses in little groops here and there;

   • 1985, Thomas Beth, Dieter Jungnickel, Hanfried Lenz, Design Theory‎ (Mathematics), Digitized edition, Bibliographisches Institut, published 2010, →ISBN, page 560:

     Delete one point x and consider as new groops the point sets B\{x} where B is any block of D containing x.

   • 2004, Dept. of Combinatorics and Optimization, Ars Combinatoria, Volumes 72-73‎ (Mathematics), University of Waterloo, page 90:

     A groop divisible design on v points with groop size g and block size k is called a t-GD[k,g,;v] if every subset of t distinct points that contains no two points from the same groop is contained in exactly one block.

groop (third-person singular simple present groops, present participle grooping, simple past and past participle grooped)

1. Alternative form of group
   • 1810, Alexander Chalmers, Samuel Johnson, editor, The works of the English poets, from Chaucer to Cowper‎, Digitized edition, published 2006, page 485:

     I GROOPED in thy pocket pretty peate.

   • 1829, The Battle of Navarino: Or the Renegade‎, Digitized edition, published 2010, page 40:

     Grooped around the fires on which they were preparing their provisions, …

• groop in An American Dictionary of the English Language, by Noah Webster, 1828.
• groop in The Century Dictionary, New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911.