group

Pronunciation: /ɡɹup/

Reading level: medium

Estimated CEFR level: A2 — Elementary

Estimated from word frequency; not an official CEFR classification.

Definition

  1. noun any number of entities (members) considered as a unit
  2. noun (chemistry) two or more atoms bound together as a single unit and forming part of a molecule
  3. noun a set that is closed, associative, has an identity element and every element has an inverse

Etymology

From French groupe (“cluster, group”), from Italian gruppo, groppo (“a knot, heap, group, bag (of money)”). 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.

In classic literature

Synonyms

grouping

Semantic network

Broader (hypernyms)
abstraction
Narrower (hyponyms)
varna, ethnic group, world, halogen, sainthood, actinoid

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