heap
/hiːp/
More pronunciations (1)Fewer pronunciations
Ireland/heːp/
heap noun: a crowd; a throng; a multitude or great number of people.
Noun (1)
heap (plural heaps)
- A crowd; a throng; a multitude or great number of people.
- A Heap of Vassals, and Slaues: […] A People that is without Naturall Affection, […] A Nation without Morality, without Letters, Arts, or Sciences1622 (date written), Francis [Bacon], “An Advertisement Touching an Holy Warre. […]”, in William Rawley, editor, Certaine Miscellany Works of the Right Honourable Francis Lo. Verulam, Viscount S....
- He had plenty of friends, heaps of friends in the parliamentary sense1858, Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne. […], volume (please specify |volume=I to III), London: Chapman & Hall, […], →OCLC
- A pile or mass; a collection of things laid in a body, or thrown together so as to form an elevation.
- a heap of earth; a heap of stones
- Huge heaps of slain around the body rise.1697, Virgil, “(please specify the book number)”, in John Dryden, transl., The Works of Virgil: Containing His Pastorals, Georgics, and Æneis. […], London: […] Jacob Tonson, […], →OCLC
- A great number or large quantity of things.
- a vast heap, both of places of scripture and quotations1679, Gilbert Burnet, The History of the Reformation of the Church of England
- I have noticed a heap of things in my life.1878, Robert Louis Stevenson, Will o' the Mill
- A data structure consisting of trees in which each node is greater than all its children.
- Memory that is dynamically allocated.
- You should move these structures from the stack to the heap to avoid a potential stack overflow.
- A dilapidated place or vehicle.
- My first car was an old heap.
- Chuffy: It's on a knife edge at the moment, Bertie. If he can get planning permission, old Stoker's going to take this heap off my hands in return for vast amounts of oof.1991 May 12, “Kidnapped!”, in Jeeves and Wooster, Series 2, Episode 5
- A lot, a large amount.
- Thanks a heap!
- [W]e went to the play, and Pen was struck all of a heap with Miss Fotheringay … And he’s fallen in love with her—and I’m blessed if he hasn’t proposed to her […]1848 November – 1850 December, William Makepeace Thackeray, chapter 10, in The History of Pendennis. […], volume (please specify |volume=I or II), London: Bradbury and Evans, […], published...
Verb
heap (third-person singular simple present heaps, present participle heaping, simple past and past participle heaped)
- To pile in a heap.
- He heaped the laundry upon the bed and began folding.
- Synonyms:
- amass
- To form or round into a heap, as in measuring.
- Cry a reward, to him who shall first bring
News of that vanished Arabian,
A full-heap’d helmet of the purest gold.1819, John Keats, Otho the Great, act I, scene II, verses 40-42
- Cry a reward, to him who shall first bring
- To supply in great quantity.
- They heaped praise upon their newest hero.
- Then, in January, a creeping tsunami of train cancellations, triggered by major staff absences as a result of the aggressive transmissibility of Omicron, heaped further misery on rail users.2022 January 12, Nigel Harris, “Comment: Unhappy start to 2022”, in RAIL, number 948, page 3
Adverb
heap (not comparable)
- very or much; representing broken English stereotypically or comically attributed to Native Americans
- Chuckaway too no good. Heap water, little chuckaway. Heap sticks, and still little chuckaway.1895, Annie Maria Barnes, Matouchon: A Story of Indian Child Life, page 175
- We are all familiar with the stereotyped broken English which writers of Western stories, comic strips, and similar literature put into the mouths of Indians: 'me heap big chief', 'you like um fire water', and so forth.1980, Joey Lee Dillard, Perspectives on American English, page 417
Noun (2) capitalized: HEAP
HEAP (plural HEAPs)
- Acronym of high explosive armor-piercing.
Proper noun capitalized: Heap
Heap
- A surname.
heap meaning in Hindi, Tamil, Marathi and Urdu
heap in Hindi
- pile
- ढेर ḍher
heap in Tamil
- குவியல்
heap in Marathi
- ढीग
heap in Urdu
- ڈھیر
More languagesFewer languages
- heap in Bengali
- স্তূপ, গাদা
- heap in Telugu
- కుప్ప
- heap in Malayalam
- കൂമ്പാരം
- heap in Sanskrit
- निचय nicaya, राशि rāśi
- heap in Arabic
- كَوْمَة kawma
- heap in Persian
- کپه koppe, توده tude, کوت kut
- heap in Vietnamese
- đống, gò
Examples of heap in a sentence
- The enormous pile of spaghetti landed on the floor in an amorphous heap.
- When she touched the artifact, it collapsed into a heap of fine dust.
- One renders young people a disservice by heaping unearned rewards on them.
Synonyms of heap
Forms of heap
| Noun | |
|---|---|
| plural | heaps |
| plural | HEAPs |
| Verb | |
| third-person singular present | heaps |
| present participle | heaping |
| past participle | heaped |
| past | heaped |
Origin of heap
From Middle English hepe, from Old English hēap, from Proto-West Germanic *haup, from Proto-Germanic *haupaz (compare Dutch hoop, German Low German Hupen, German Haufen), from Proto-Indo-European *koupos (“hill”) (compare Lithuanian kaũpas, Albanian qipi (“stack”), Avestan 𐬐𐬂𐬟𐬀 (kåfa)).
English surname, from the noun heap.
Words formed from heap
- Heapster
- aheap
- all of a heap
- ant-heap
- antheap
- ash-heap
- ash-heap-cake
- ash heap of history
- at the top of the heap
- compost heap
- dung heap
- dung-heap
- dustheap
- dust heap of history
- garbage heap of history
- Heap Bridge
- heaper
- heapful
- heapmeal
- heapsort
- heapy
- it takes a heap of living to make a house a home
- it takes a heap o' livin' to make a house a home
- junkheap
- minheap
- moleheap
- muckheap
- mudheap
- sandheap
- scrap heap
- scrapheap
- scrap-heap
- semiheap
- shellheap
- shitheap
- slag heap
- spoil heap
- subheap
- thanks a heap
- to-heap
- trash heap of history
- treap
- heapability
- heapable
- heap coals of fire on someone's head
- heaped
- heaping
- heap insult on injury
- heap on
- heap up
- overheap
- upheap
Words that rhyme with heap
Questions about heap
- What does heap mean?
- Heap means a crowd; a throng; a multitude or great number of people.
- What is heap in Hindi?
- Heap in Hindi is ढेर (ḍher). See Heap meaning in Hindi.
- What part of speech is heap?
- Heap can be a noun, a verb, an adverb or a proper noun.
- How do you pronounce heap?
- Heap is pronounced /hiːp/.
- What is the plural of heap?
- The plural of heap is heaps.
Words near heap in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: heap (page history and authors); HEAP (page history and authors); Heap (page history and authors); heap (Tamil, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); heap (Marathi, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); heap (Urdu, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); heap (Bengali, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); heap (Telugu, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); heap (Malayalam, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license). 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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-heap.ogg.
Cite this entry: “heap.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/heap. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.