coop
/kuːp
/noun
1A cage or pen in which poultry are kept.Many of the lots had a barn for a cow and horses, and a coop for chickens....
- At the side of the house stood a barn, and a coop full of chickens scratching at the dry cracked earth.
- For $80, the farmer sold his guests eight metal nesting boxes, old barn wood with which to build a coop, four Rhode Island Reds, and a sack of feed.
Synonyms
pen, run, cage, hutch, enclosure, pound, lock-up;
birdcage, aviary, mew;
Scottish parrock
1.1British A basket used in catching fish.
verb [with object]
1 (usually be cooped up) Confine in a small space: being cooped up indoors all day makes him fidgety...
- Her children were playing near the pond, running free as if they had been cooped up in a confined day care center all day.
- I wasn't cooped up indoors all day with a computer or the TV.
- Does the thought of being cooped up indoors watching a game bore you to tears?
Synonyms
confine, shut in, close in, shut up, mew up, keep, detain, trap;
lock up, imprison, incarcerate, immure, intern, impound, hold captive, hold prisoner, put under lock and key;
cage, cage in, pen in, fence in, rail in, wall in, hem in, enclose
2Put or keep (poultry) in a cage or pen: our free-range chickens roam the barnyard instead of staying cooped up in a henhouse...
- Free-range poultry may have been as cooped up as conventional poultry.
- But he passes on the dish, maybe because I cooped a couple of the birds in his dog's kennel for a night.
- It's cold and gray and I feel like a chicken cooped up in a particularly small cage.
Origin
Middle English cowpe; related to Dutch kuip 'vat' and German Kufe 'cask', based on Latin cupa. Compare with cooper.
The Latin word cupa ‘barrel’ is the forerunner of coop, ‘a cage or pen in which poultry are kept’, and also gave us cooper (Middle English), meaning ‘barrel-maker’. In medieval English a coop was a kind of basket that you placed over chickens that were sitting or being fattened.