Word.ws English Dictionary

groop

groop noun: a trench or small ditch. Also the obsolete form of group.

Noun

groop (plural groops)

  1. (Northern England, Scotland, UK, dialectal, obsolete) A trench or small ditch.
  2. (Northern England, Scotland, UK, dialectal, obsolete) A trench or drain; particularly, a trench or hollow behind the stalls of cows or horses for receiving their dung and urine.
    • 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, …1816, James Cleland, Annals of Glasgow, Digitized edition, published 2007, page 373
    • Cleaning the byre involved barrowing out the contents of the groop, sluicing it down and rebedding it with clean straw.2008, Dennis O'Driscoll, Seamus Heaney, Stepping stones
  3. (Northern England, Scotland, UK, dialectal, obsolete) A pen for cattle; a byre.

Verb

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.

Also used as

groop is also the obsolete form of group.

Forms of groop

Noun
pluralgroops
alternative formgrupe
alternative formgroap
alternative formgrube
Verb
third-person singular presentgroops
present participlegrooping
past participlegrooped
pastgrooped

Origin of groop

From Middle English grope, grupe, groupe, from Old English grōp (“ditch”), from Proto-West Germanic *grōpu, 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.

Alteration of group. More at group.

Questions about groop

What does groop mean?
Groop means a trench or small ditch.
What part of speech is groop?
Groop can be a noun or a verb.
What is the plural of groop?
The plural of groop is groops.

Words near groop in the dictionary

  1. groomswomen
  2. groomy
  3. groomzilla
  4. groomzillas
  5. Groonland
  6. groop
  7. grooped
  8. grooper
  9. groopers
  10. grooping
  11. groops

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: groop (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “groop.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/groop. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.