Troop

Troop (pronounced troop)

(1) An assemblage of persons or things; company; band.

(2) A great number or multitude.

(3) In historic military use, (usually) an armored cavalry, cavalry or artillery battery consisting of two or more platoons and a headquarters group.

(4) As troops, a body of soldiers, police etc.

(5) A unit of Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts usually having a maximum of 32 members under the guidance of an adult leader.

(6) A herd, flock or swarm of some living creatures.

(7) A band or troupe of actors (archaic).

(8) In British military use, to carry (the flag or colours) in a ceremonial way before troops.  The correct term is "Trooping the colour", not the oft-heard "Trooping of the colours" and the ceremonial event is conducted also by military formations in countries with military traditions influenced by the British (usually dating from some association with the old British Empire).  

(9) To assemble or form into a troop or troops.

(10) An alternative spelling of troupe (archaic).

(11) In British military slang, formerly to report a soldier for a breach of discipline (archaic).

(12) An alternative word for consort (archaic).

(13) The collective noun for a group of baboons.

(14) In music, a particular roll of the drum; a quick march.

(15) In mycology, mushrooms that are in a close group but not close enough to be called a cluster.

(16) To gather in a company; flock together.

(17) To come, go, or pass in great numbers; throng; to walk, as if in a march; go; to walk, march, or pass in rank or order.

(18) To associate or consort (usually followed by with).

(19) To work as a trooper. 

(20) To work steadily without complaint; to persevere ("What a trooper!" the usual praise for such folk.

1545: From the French troupe, from the Old French trope (band of people, company, troop, crowd), of uncertain origin but perhaps from the Frankish throp (assembly, gathering of people), from the Proto-Germanic þurpą (village, land, estate), from the primitive Indo-European treb- (dwelling, settlement) or a back-formation of troupeau, diminutive of the Medieval Latin troppus (flock) and Middle French troupe, from which Modern French gained troupeau (herd)), the construct being trop- (from the Germanic form thorp) + -el, from the Latin –ellus, the diminutive suffix.  There may have been some connection with the Old English ðorp or the Old Norse thorp (village) and the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) suggest the French form was from the Latin troppus (flock) of unknown origin but may also have been picked-up from the (speculative) Germanic source.  Doublet of troupe, and possibly also of thorp and dorp; it was cognate with the German Dorf (village).  Troop, trooper & trooping are nouns & verbs and trooped is a verb; the noun plural is troops (troopers the more commonly used form).

It came to be applied to groups of animals in the 1580s, the military adoption for a “subdivision of a cavalry force" dating from the same time, the general use of ‘troop” to describe any “armed forces” attested from the 1590s.  Troops were part of the structure in the Boy Scouts from the organization's beginnings in 1908, the Girl Scouts emulating this upon formation four years later.  In modern use, the spelling troupe has assumed the exclusive use of describing a company of actors, singers, acrobats or other entertainers and performers.  The noun troop is a linguistic curiosity.  It’s used as a collective noun (a troop of girl-scouts) and in the noun plural (the troops) but not as a noun singular (one doesn’t refer to individual troops as “a troop”) but there is the noun singular “trooper”.

The Dilworth Story.

In the slim volume The Dilworth Story (1954), US historian of machinery & transportation Franklin M. Reck (1896-1965) wrote of the way Richard Dilworth would illustrate the point that many “inventions” credited to a single individual often come from the labours of many by citing the quote: “My mother was a canteen lassie.  Anyone of a troop of dragoons was my father.”  That, he claimed, was “a line from Bobby Burns.”  The Scottish poet Robert Burns (1759–1796) was known familiarly as “Rabbie Burns” and there seems no doubt about the identities of his parents who neither worked in canteens nor were member of military troops but it’s a memorable line worthy of Burns and the word “lassie” (used in Scotland and northern England to refer to girls and young ladies, usually in an affectionate sense) does appear in his works so to Mr Dilworth it must have sounded plausibly Burnsian.  Sayings sometimes are attributed to Burns on the basis of “sounding Scottish”, the same phenomenon explaining the fate of pithy phrases thought “Shakespearian” or “Churchillian”.  Richard Dilworth (1885-1968) was a self-taught engineer who made notable contributions to the development of diesel-electric locomotives in the US and it was only his modest character which seems to have relegated him to obscurity while others perhaps less worthy receive at least footnotes.  Published by the Electro-Motive Division of GM (General Motors), the foreword to The Dilworth Story was written by Charles F. Kettering (1876–1958), the US engineer responsible for many good things but also the introduction of leaded gasoline (petrol), an ecological disaster which would for half a century-odd poison the world.

Military and para-military use

Para-military use: Lindsay Lohan and attorney Mark Heller (b 1945) arrive at Los Angeles Superior Court, 18 March, 2013, a phalanx of Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department troopers clearing her path.

The troop as a military sub-unit continues to exist in some armed and police forces but tends now not in general to be part of military structures.  It was originally a tactical group, a small formation of cavalry, part of a squadron deployed on a battlefield for a specific action and it’s in that sense that use persists, troop sometimes an alternative term for an infantry section or platoon.  There are historic exceptions in the US Cavalry and the British Army where a troop can be an infantry company or artillery battery.  The Australian Army uses the term, a troop a platoon sized element and the general term for army personnel (and literally the private soldier) is trooper.  Technically, it’s only the SASR (Special Air Service Regiment; special forces) of the RA Inf (Royal Australian Infantry Corps) which uses troop to refer to its platoon size formations but it seems embedded as common slang.  As a general principle, where used in the military, a troop tends to be platoon-sized except in the US Cavalry, where it’s equivalent to a company (ie three to four platoons) and, when combined, these form a regiment, the change in nomenclature dating from 1883.

Para-military use: A troop of Covid-era Girl Scouts selling Covid-era Girl Scout Cookies (Girl Guide Biscuits in some places).

In civilian use, many US police forces use troop and trooper because they modelled their command structures along military lines, the same reason the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts adopted the form although, in these less robust times, it’s become common, especially with the latter, to replace troop with company, the now less-fashionable military connection being less overt.  One exception was the Salvation Army which never used troop, either as an organizational unit or in the collective to describe its members although, it was common to refer to them as "Christian soldiers".  They did use military ranks and some of the structural terms (such as corps and division) were adopted but never troop.

One Girl Scout troop’s entrepreneurial flair in March 2026 caused a stir, Fox News reporting the bumper sales the young ladies booked after setting up for business outside a cannabis dispensary in Mount Laurel, New Jersey (one of some 200 outlets in the state).  The choice of location was of course sound, stimulation of the appetite one of the best-known side-effects of using the substance; it's one of the many reasons it came to be used for medicinal purposes.  The opportunistic pop-up cookie store proved synergistic, the dispensary's hungry stoners queueing for a sugary treat while the owner of Daylite Cannabis told Fox News the store's foot traffic had increased while the troop plied their trade.  He revealed also that many of his customers stopped at the Girl Scout's booth before entering his shop, proving at least some weed-smokers think ahead.  Whether the girls were (empirically or otherwise) familiar with the phenomenon of “the munchies” or the choice of location was made by someone else wasn’t revealed but it seems Girl Scouts head office wasn’t impressed and the venture won’t be repeated.