crowd
/ˈkɹaʊ̯d/ verb, noun
- verb (intransitive) To press forward; to advance by pushing. “The man crowded into the packed room.”
- verb (intransitive) To press together or collect in numbers. “They crowded through the archway and into the park.”
- verb (transitive) To press or drive together, especially into a small space; to cram. “He tried to crowd too many cows into the cow-pen.”
- verb (transitive) To fill by pressing or thronging together
- verb (transitive, often used with "out of" or "off") To push, to press, to shove. “They tried to crowd her off the sidewalk.”
- verb (nautical) To approach another ship too closely when it has right of way.
- verb (nautical, of a square-rigged ship, transitive) To carry excessive sail in the hope of moving faster.
- verb (transitive) To press by solicitation; to urge; to dun; hence, to treat discourteously or unreasonably.
- noun A group of people congregated or collected into a close body without order. “After the movie let out, a crowd of people pushed through the exit doors.”
- noun Several things collected or closely pressed together; also, some things adjacent to each other. “There was a crowd of toys pushed beneath the couch where the children were playing.”
- noun (with definite article) The so-called lower orders of people; the populace; the vulgar.
- noun A group of people united or at least characterised by a common interest. “That obscure author's fans were a nerdy crowd which hardly ever interacted before the Internet age.”
- noun (now dialectal) A fiddle.
- verb (obsolete, intransitive) To play on a crowd; to fiddle.
Synonyms
barge swarm throng crowd in crush pile horde becrowd aggregation cluster group mass everyone general public hoi polloi masses rabble mob tag-rag unwashed crew gang bunch herd crowd together push
Etymology
From Middle English crouden, from Old English crūdan, from Proto-West Germanic *krūdan, from Proto-Germanic *krūdaną, *kreudaną, ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *grewt- (“to push; press”). Cognate with German Low German kroden (“to push, shove”), Dutch kruien (“to push, shove”).
(group of people, mob): Compare typologically throng (<<~ Proto-Germanic *þrinhwaną); Czech dav (akin to Russian дави́ть (davítʹ), да́вка (dávka)); Polish ciżba, ścisk (<~ ciskać, akin to ти́скать (tískatʹ)); Polish tłok, Russian толчея́ (tolčejá) (akin to толка́ть (tolkátʹ)).
Inherited from Middle English crowde, from Welsh crwth or a Celtic cognate.
Webster’s 1913
- verb To push, to press, to shove. Chaucer.
- verb To press or drive together; to mass together. "Crowd us and crush us." Shak.
- verb To press together or collect in numbers; to swarm; to throng.
- verb To urge or press forward; to force one's self; as, a man crowds into a room.
Etymology [OE. crouden, cruden, AS. cr; cf. D. kruijen to push in a wheelbarrow.]
Etymology [AS. croda. See Crowd, v. t.]
Sources: Wiktionary · WordNet 3.0 · Webster’s 1913 — from the Wiktionary entry “crowd”, CC BY-SA 4.0. Details