Crop

Crop (pronounced krop)

(1) In agriculture, the cultivated produce of the ground, both while growing and when harvested.

(2) In aggregate, the yield of such produce for a particular season.

(3) The yield of some other product in a season.

(4) A supply produced in a given (not necessarily annual or seasonal) period.

(5) A collection or group of persons or things appearing or occurring together (often as “current crop”, “this year’s crop etc”).

(6) The stock or handle of a whip.

(7) In equine use, variously (1) a short riding whip consisting of a stock without a lash (also called riding crop) or (2) less commonly, the lashing end of a whip, both styles used in the BDSM community.

(8) In zoology, a pouch in the esophagus of many birds, in which food is held for later digestion or for regurgitation to nestlings (also called the craw);  a chamber or pouch in the foregut of arthropods and annelids for holding and partly crushing food.

(9) In agriculture, the act of cropping (including having animals crop by allowing them to eat what’s growing).

(10) A mark produced by clipping the ears (used with cattle and other livestock).

(11) In hairdressing, a close-cropped hairstyle or a head of hair so cut.

(12) An entire tanned hide of an animal.

(13) In mining, (1) an outcrop of a vein or seam or (2) tin ore prepared for smelting.

(14) To cut off or remove the head or top of plants, grass etc; to cut off the ends or part of something; to cut short.

(15) As crop-top (or crop top & croptop), a shirt or top cut high to expose the midriff.

(16) In photography and image manipulation, to cut off unwanted parts of a print, negative or digital image (historically those parts at the edges but the term has long been used for general editing).

(17) The entire tanned hide of an animal.

(18) In medicine and pathology, a group of vesicles at the same stage of development in a disease.

(19) In geology, the shortened form of outcrop.

(20) In architecture, the foliate part of a finial.

Pre 900: From the Middle English crop & croppe, from the Old English crop & cropp & croppa (sprout, or top of a plant, bunch or cluster of flowers, ear of wheat (or other grain), paunch, crown of a tree, craw of a bird, a kidney), from the Proto-West Germanic kropp, from the Proto-Germanic kruppaz (body, trunk, crop), from the primitive Indo-European grewb- (to warp, bend, crawl).  It was cognate with Dutch krop (crop), the German Low German Kropp (a swelling on the neck, the craw, maw), the German Kropf (the craw, ear of grain, head of lettuce or cabbage), the Swedish kropp (body, trunk), the Norwegian kröypa (to bend), the Old Norse kroppr (rump, body) and the Icelandic kroppur (a hunch on the body).  Crop was related to crap and was a doublet of group and croup.  The verb was from the Middle English croppen (to cut, pluck and eat), from the Old English croppian.  It was cognate with the Scots crap (to crop), the Dutch kroppen (to cram, digest), the Low German kröppen (to cut, crop, stuff the craw), the German kröpfen (to crop), the Icelandic kroppa (to cut, crop, pick); the sense of all was literally, to remove the crop (top, head, ear) of a plant.  Crop is a noun & verb, cropping & cropped (cropt was the archaic spelling); the noun plural is crops.

Lindsay Lohan in crop tops.  All these photographs have been cropped to render them in the same aspect ratio.

Crop started modestly enough for a word which evolved to enjoy such a definitional range and use idiomatic form: In the Old English it meant only (1) craw of a bird & (2) rounded head or top of a herb and while the latter is found also in High German dialects, the subsequent developments in the sense of “head or top” generally and of “produce to be harvested from the fields” appear exclusive to English.  The meaning "grain and other cultivated plants grown and harvested" (especially "the grain yield of one year"), having been in Anglo-Latin in the early 1200s, was adopted in Middle English a century later, the sense development thought something which happened under the influence of the early thirteenth century verbal meaning "cut off the top of a plant".  From the notion in agriculture of “top” cam the use to describe the "upper part of a whip" which evolved by the 1560s be the "handle of a whip" (1560s) and thus by 1857 "a kind of whip used by horsemen in the hunting field" (1857).  Unlike traditional whips (which were really one long lash), it proved useful in having a rigid handle and thus could be hand for things like opening gates or other tasks when a wand or stick helped.

Riding crops are a staple device in the BDSM (Bondage, Discipline (although some say Dominance & submission is more indicative of actual practice) & SadoMasochism) community.  The photograph at the right was a "mid-session" promotional shot and has been cropped. 

The general sense of "anything gathered when ready or in season" dates from the 1570s and the idea of the “thick, short head of hair" was from 1795, both developed from the late fourteenth century sense of "top or highest part of anything".  In Middle English, crop and rote (the whole plant, crop and root) was figurative of totality or perfection.  The concept of the crop-circle dates from a surprisingly recent 1974 although they had been noted before.  The verb in the sense of “cut off the top of a plant” evolved from the verb around the turn of the thirteenth century, extended by circa 1350 to animals (originally of sheep) feeding on plants.  The general meaning “to cut off” dates from the mid fifteenth century, used from circa 1600 to refer to the practice of “cutting off a part of the ear of an animal as a mark of identification and ownership”.  In tailoring, as a term to describe the clipping of cloth, it’s been in use since 1711 and surprisingly perhaps, in fashion the staple crop top seems first to have been described as such only after 1984.  Crop and harvest can for many purposes be used interchangeably to refer to a season’s produce.  Yield refers to the return in food obtained from land at the end of a season of growth and can also be used in highly technical ways to measure metrics of specific efficiency and output.  Crop also denotes the amount produced at one cutting or for one particular season while harvest denotes either the time of reaping and gathering, or the gathering, or that which is gathered: the season of harvest; to work in a harvest; a ripe harvest.  Produce once described little more than household vegetables and still has that sense but the use has expanded.

Top before & after: The undesirable part of the photo has been cropped-out.  Lower before & after: The undesirable part of the photo has been edited-out.

In photography and image manipulation, cropping is the cutting off of un-wanted parts of a print, negative or digital image.  Technically, a crop is performed only at the edges and the removal of any other part is an edit by "crop" has long been industry slang for just about any modification.

Crop-up (to sprout, appear apparently without design from below the surface), although now most associated with agriculture was actually a mid-nineteenth century borrowing from mining where it referred to the geological phenomenon of the veins of ore or strata of rock “coming to the surface and becoming visible on the ground", that use noted since the 1660s.  The cropper dates from 1858 (usually as “come-a-cropper”) was a fall, originally from horseback and, as it usually involved the rider being thrown over the horse's head, there was always the connotation of failure but it now refers to a fall of any kind and elicits usually sympathy or myth depending on the severity of injury.  Also based on the idea of “head, sprout or top”, outcrop was first use in geology in 1801 to mean “exposure of rocks at the surface”.  The noun sharecropper (and share-cropper) was coined 1887 to describe the particular form of leasehold used in the southern US whereby a land-holder would lease land to a tenant to plant and harvest, also receiving a defined share of the crop. The noun share-crop came into use in 1867 and was used as a verb by 1871 although the noun sharecropping seems not to have been in use before 1936.  The cash-crop was one produced for sale rather than consumption; a bumper crop was a very good harvest (based on an old meaning of bumper as “big, full to the brim”); and crop rotation was a method of agricultural management designed to preserve the fertility of soil and limit the proliferation of pests; crop dusting was the spraying of crops with fertilizer or insecticide from low-flying aircraft dubbed crop-dusters; the cream of the crop is the best of any particular group.