group
/ɡruːp
/noun [treated as singular or plural]
1A number of people or things that are located, gathered, or classed together: a group of boys approached the bulbs should be planted in groups...
- He also feared for the safety of other pupils when the boy ran towards a group leaving the class, on May 17 last year.
- The sheets would be cut to approximate size, then they would be gathered into groups of three or four, folded in half and trimmed to the correct size.
- The extent of this clustering was similar in all four social class groups.
Synonyms
category, class, classification, grouping, set, lot, batch, bracket, type, sort, kind, variety, family, species, genus, breed, style;
grade, grading, rank, status
crowd, band, company, party, body, gathering, congregation, assembly, collection, cluster, flock, pack, troop, gang, batch
informal bunch
1.1A number of people that work together or share certain beliefs: I now belong to my local drama group...
- Money left over is to go towards a new parish council noticeboard and the remainder will be shared among local groups.
- We need to form a progressive coalition that includes the religious groups sharing our morality.
- Both groups come together to share workshops, intensive training and performances.
Synonyms
faction, division, section, clique, coterie, circle, set, ring, camp, bloc, caucus, cabal, junta, fringe movement, splinter group, minority group
1.2A commercial organization consisting of several companies under common ownership: the largest newspaper group in the UK...
- We start with a joint session between the contracts and commercial law groups.
- Commercial groups or individuals will continue to pay for the use of the facility as before.
- Many official bodies and commercial groups regard stickers and pasted posters as closely related to graffiti.
1.3A number of musicians who play popular music together: I’ve always been a fan of the guitarists in the group...
- Rock'n'roll groups appeared on bills along with trad groups and pop singers - even some modern jazz made it into the charts.
- Robert is joined by Vincent Courtois on cello and Cyril Atef on drums in a chamber jazz group of the highest order.
- It is yet another landmark in the career of one of soul music's greatest groups.
1.4 Military A division of an air force, usually consisting of two or more stations.
2 Chemistry A set of elements occupying a column in the periodic table and having broadly similar properties arising from their similar electronic structure.Ramsay realized that argon and helium might be members of a hitherto unsuspected new group in the Periodic Table.
2.1A combination of atoms having a recognizable identity in a number of compounds: a methyl group...
- Solitary lines are from the fatty acid terminal methyl groups, triglyceride backbone carbons, and carboxyl carbons.
- Glycerol is a polyhydroxy alcohol containing three carbon atoms and three hydroxyl groups.
- This messenger in turn activates a so-called kinase, an enzyme that attaches phosphate groups to other proteins.
3 Mathematics A set of elements, together with an associative binary operation, which contains an inverse for each element and an identity element.Netto made major steps towards abstract group theory when he combined permutation group results and groups in number theory....
- One of the areas which his work took him into was infinite permutation groups.
- He was the first to give a proof that the Galois group is closed under multiplication.
4 Linguistics (In systemic grammar) a level of structure between clause and word, broadly corresponding to phrase in other grammars.An acronym is a word group created in a similar way to an initialism but which is pronounced as a word....
- You will be sure to find, in almost every line of print, at least one group of words that has an idiomatic feel to it.
- The conventional belief is that speech is made up of individual words, whereas we really speak groups of words.
verb [with object and adverbial]
1Put in a group or groups: three chairs were grouped around a table...
- But we have interaccountability by grouping people together in teams, so that we have people watching each other and making sure that we hold each other accountable.
- I'm going to try to group a team together, so if you are interested in taking part leave a message in the comments below or email me.
- The evening session was more lively with the Club conducting a competition for the children, who were grouped into three teams.
Synonyms
assemble, collect, gather together, mass, amass, cluster, clump, bunch;
arrange, organize, marshal, range, line up, dispose
1.1Put into categories; classify: molluscs are grouped into seven different classes...
- Photographs featured on the web site are grouped into seven categories - as are the albums.
- Furthest away are other science disciplines that would be grouped in different broad categories from psychology, like physics and chemistry.
- Eleven manufacturers who received five to seven nominations were grouped into Category 1.
Synonyms
categorize, classify, class, sort, bracket, pigeonhole, grade, rate, rank;
designate, label, tag, brand;
file, catalogue, list, tabulate, index, assign
1.2 [no object, with adverbial] Form a group or groups: growers began to group together to form cooperatives...
- They are often found in groups of hundreds or thousands, flying in long lines or grouped tightly together on the water.
- Several labor organizations have grouped together to pledge to use their workers' rights to take the day off on the upcoming World Labor Day on May 1.
- But the idea now being looked at involves different organisations in the centre grouping together to pay for a guard to patrol the walkways of the centre.
Synonyms
unite, join up, join together, team up, join forces, pool resources, club together, get together, come together, gather;
collaborate, work together, pull together, cooperate;
link, ally, associate, fraternize, form an alliance, affiliate, federate;
amalgamate, combine, merge, integrate, consolidate
Derivatives
groupage
/ noun ...- Up to 70 jobs in Orkney, Shetland and Aberdeen have been secured following the announcement that the management buy-out team have been successful in acquiring the haulage and groupage operations.
- It's a service that's probably at the wrong time for groupage consignments because they are still taking loads and collecting their deliveries up to four in the afternoon, which have to be consolidated into a load and then taken to a ferry.
Origin
Late 17th century: from French groupe, from Italian gruppo, of Germanic origin; related to crop.
crop from Old English:
From around ad 700 to the late 18th century crop, related to group (late 17th century), had a sense ‘flower head, ear of corn’, which gave rise to the main modern meaning ‘a cultivated plant grown on a large scale’ and also to senses referring to the top of something, such as the verb uses ‘to cut very short’ or ‘to bite off and eat the tops of plants’. The sense ‘a very short hairstyle’ goes back to the late 18th century but is particularly associated with the 1920s, when the Eton crop, reminiscent of the style then worn at the English public school Eton, was fashionable for young women.
To come a cropper is to suffer a defeat or disaster. The origin of the phrase may be the 19th-century hunting slang term ‘cropper’, meaning ‘a heavy fall’. Cropper probably came from neck and crop, an expression meaning ‘completely or thoroughly’ and originally used in the context of a horse falling to the ground. Crop here referred either to the rider's whip (originally the top part of a whip) or the horse's hindquarters. This sense is found in Old French croupe ‘rump’, which appears as croup in Middle English, and is the source of the crupper (Middle English), the bit of harness that goes from the saddle under the horse's tail, and which lies behind the word croupier (early 18th century). In early use, this was a term for a person standing behind a gambler to give advice, adopted from French, cropier ‘pillion rider, rider on the croup’.