group
UK /ɡɹuːp/ · US /ɡɹup/ noun, verb
Forms groups grouping grouped groop groupe
- noun (collective) A number of things or persons being in some relation to one another. “there is a group of houses behind the hill; he left town to join a Communist group”
- noun (group theory) A set with an associative binary operation, under which there exists an identity element, and such that each element has an inverse.
- noun (geometry, archaic) An effective divisor on a curve.
- noun A (usually small) group of people who perform music together. “Did you see the new jazz group?”
- noun (astronomy) A small number (up to about fifty) of galaxies that are near each other.
- noun (chemistry) A column in the periodic table of chemical elements.
- noun (chemistry) A functional group. “Nitro is an electron-withdrawing group.”
- noun (sociology) A subset of a culture or of a society.
- verb (transitive) To put together to form a group. “group the dogs by hair colour”
- verb (intransitive) To come together to form a group.
- verb (transitive, sports) To eliminate in the group stage of a competition.
Synonyms
collection set band ensemble amass assemble categorise categorize classify collect collect up gather gather together gather up begather foregather throng grouping radical chemical group mathematical group aggroup
Antonyms
Etymology
From French groupe (“cluster, group”), from Italian gruppo, groppo (“a knot, heap, group, bag (of money)”). Displaced native Old English hād (“tribe, group”).
In the "group theory" sense, calqued from French groupe, a term coined by the young French mathematician Évariste Galois in 1830.
Cognate with German Kropf (“crop, craw, bunch”); Old English cropp, croppa (“cluster, bunch, sprout, flower, berry, ear of corn, crop”) (whence English crop); Dutch krop (“craw”), Icelandic kroppr (“hump, bunch”). Doublet of crop and croup. Compare Persian گروه.
Webster’s 1913
- noun A cluster, crowd, or throng; an assemblage, either of persons or things, collected without any regular form or arrangement; as, a group of men or of trees; a group of isles.
- noun An assemblage of objects in a certain order or relation, or having some resemblance or common characteristic; as, groups of strata.
- verb To form a group of; to arrange or combine in a group or in groups, often with reference to mutual relation and the best effect; to form an assemblage of. The difficulty lies in drawing and disposing, or, as the painters term it, in grouping such a multitude of different objects. Prior.
Etymology [F groupe, It. gruppo, groppo, cluster, bunch, packet, group; of G. origin: cf. G. krepf craw, crop, tumor, bunch. See Crop, n.]
Etymology [Cf. F. grouper. See Group, n.]
Sources: Wiktionary · WordNet 3.0 · Webster’s 1913 — from the Wiktionary entry “group”, CC BY-SA 4.0. Details