crop

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

• noun Cultivated plants or agricultural produce, such as grain, vegetables, or fruit, considered as a group.
• noun The total yield of such produce in a particular season or place.
• noun A group, quantity, or supply appearing at one time.
• noun A short haircut.
• noun An earmark on an animal.
• noun A short whip used in horseback riding, with a loop serving as a lash.
• noun The stock of a whip.
• noun A pouchlike enlargement of a bird's gullet in which food is partially digested or stored for regurgitation to nestlings.
• noun A similar enlargement in the digestive tract of annelids and insects.
• intransitive verb To cut or bite off the tops or ends of.
• intransitive verb To cut (hair, for example) very short.
• intransitive verb To clip (an animal's ears, for example).
• intransitive verb To trim (a photograph or picture, for example).
• intransitive verb To harvest.
• intransitive verb To cause to grow or yield a crop.
• intransitive verb To feed on growing grasses and herbage.
• intransitive verb To plant, grow, or yield a crop.

from The Century Dictionary.

• noun The top or highest part of anything, especially of an herb or a tree.
• noun Corn and other cultivated plants grown and garnered; the produce of the ground; harvest: as, the crops are 10 per cent. larger than last year; in a more restricted sense, that which is cut, gathered, or garnered from a single field, or of a particular kind of grain or fruit, or in a single season: as, the wheat-crop; the potato-crop.
• noun Corn and other cultivated plants while growing: as, a standing crop; the crop in the ground; the crops are all backward this year.
• noun The first stomach of a fowl; the craw; the ingluvies: sometimes used humorously of the human maw or stomach.
• noun In insects, an anterior dilatation of the alimentary canal, succeeded by the proventriculus. See cut under Blattidæ.
• noun Anything gathered when ready or in season: as, the ice-crop.
• noun The act of cutting or clipping off, as hair: as, he has given you a pretty close crop.
• noun An ear-mark.
• noun The hair of the head when thick and short, forming a sort of cap.
• noun A wig of rough, short hair.
• noun In mining, the outcrop of a lode. See outcrop.
• noun In tanning, an entire untrimmed hide, struck for sole-leather. Also called crop-hide.
• noun A fixed weight in different localities for sugar, tobacco, and other staples. A crop hogshead of tobacco is from 1,000 to 1,300 pounds net.
• noun A kind of whip used by horsemen in the hunting-field, consisting of a short, stout, and straight staff having a crooked handle, and a loop of leather at the end.
• To shear; cut the nap from, as woolen cloth.
• To cut down needlessly the outer margins of a book. When this cutting shaves the type the book so treated is said to be bled.
• To take off the top or head of (a plant); cut off the ends of; eat off; pull off; pluck; mow; reap: as, to crop flowers, trees, or grass; to crop fruit from the tree.
• To cut off a part of (the ear of an animal) as a mark of identification, or for other reasons.
• To cause to bear a crop; plant or fill with crops; raise crops on: as, to crop a field.
• To sprout; appear in part, and apparently by accident or undesignedly, from beneath the surface or otherwise from concealment; become partly visible or obvious: with out, sometimes up or forth.
• To appear incidentally and undesignedly; come to light or to the surface: as, his peculiarities crop out in his work; the truth cropped out in spite of him.
• To yield harvest.
• noun In cattle, a portion of the back, on either side of the median line, immediately back of the shoulder. See cut under point
• noun The working unit in the making of turpentine, consisting of a forest tract of from 200 to 250 acres, containing approximately 10,500 faces.
• noun In certain cephalopods and other mollusks, a more or less dilated portion of the esophagus, sometimes forming a lobular cæcum.
• noun In the United States, usually a crop of which the herbage is eaten either green or dry, not exclusive of pasturage; the meaning is not well defined with reference to roots, which (until recently the sugar-beet) have been little grown in the United States. (See the extract.) T. Shaw (“Forage Crops,” p. 1) restricts the term to pasture crops other than grasses.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

• transitive verb To cut off the tops or tips of; to bite or pull off; to browse; to pluck; to mow; to reap.