hump
/hʌmp
/noun
1A rounded raised mass of earth or land: they sat on a hump of cropped grass...
- If one were to travel past the countless monolithic factories and coal pits of the world's main continent, and onto where the equator was once, one would find a small hump of earth.
- Thanks to a dry course, the ball landed on the downhill side of a grass hump and rolled 30 yards straight onto the green and into the cup.
- The smooth humps of downland suited his purpose.
1.1A mound over which railway vehicles are pushed so as to run by gravity over points to the required place in a marshalling yard.A single-track hump can handle about 800 cars per shift....
- Lastly, to accommodate the increasing postwar coal business, 26 more tracks were added to the classification yard west of the hump in 1949.
- Six more tracks were also added to the classification yard, west of the hump.
2A rounded protuberance found on the back of a camel or other animal or as an abnormality on the back of a person: his back rose into a kind of hump at the base of the spine...
- He provides a sketch of a creature with the head of an elephant, a fishlike body with a camel hump, four legs like a lion, and a forked tail like a fish.
- The wild Bactrian camel has longer legs, lighter fur, and smaller humps than domesticated camels have.
- These adverse events include acne, easy bruising, moon face, swollen ankles, hirsutism, buffalo hump, and skin striae.
Synonyms
protuberance, lump, bump, knob, protrusion, prominence, projection, bulge, swelling, hunch, nodule, node, mass, growth, outgrowth, excrescence
rare tumescence, tumefaction, intumescence
verb
1 [with object and adverbial of direction] informal, chiefly British Carry (a heavy object) with difficulty: he continued to hump cases up and down the hotel corridor...
- Removals took one full day moving to and fro between the two houses with my two sons helping to hump the heavy stuff into and out of the van.
- And the vandal humping various bags of concrete and heavy tools around in the middle of the night may also have been deterred by the sight of a uniform or two.
- I saw one group of traders run off like a startled herd, humping their bags of bags, while three police, like a pack of hunting dogs, scragged the least nimble.
Synonyms
carry, lug, heave, lift, shoulder, hoist, heft, tote
informal schlep
Scottish informal humph
rare upheave
2 [with object] Make hump-shaped: he turned and humped his body to avoid a rope...
- Without further pause and again in silence, I hump my body up over the rock.
Synonyms
arch, curve, hunch, bend, bow, curl, crook
3 [with object] vulgar slang Have sexual intercourse with.
4 (usually in imperative hump off) Irish informal Go away.Does he ever feel like telling people to just hump off?
Phrases
get (or have or give someone) the hump
over the hump
Derivatives
humpless
- Our work has shown that the cattle of Europe, northern Asia, and Africa all have closely related DNA sequences and that they all belong to a group that corresponds most closely to the humpless cattle known as Bos taurus.
- A pencil drawing from 1982 presents four hunchbacks and freaks aboard a humpless camel standing on a platform mounted on a wheelcart.
- Among these large animals was the prehistoric forerunner of all domestic humpless cattle: the aurochs.
Origin
Early 18th century: probably related to Low German humpe 'hump', also to Dutch homp, Low German humpe 'lump, hunk (of bread)'.
If something annoying makes you get the hump the word is being used in something like its original sense. Hump arrived in English in the mid 17th century and is probably related to German humpe ‘hump’, and to Dutch homp ‘lump, hunk of bread’. Its earliest use was to mean ‘a complaint’, especially in the rhyming phrase humps and grumps, the ancestor of get the hump. With reference to a personal deformity it dates from the early 18th century.