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heap.

A crowd; a throng; a multitude or great number of people.

4 characters1 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

noun/hiːp//heːp/Ireland, dated
  1. A crowd; a throng; a multitude or great number of people.

  2. A pile or mass; a collection of things laid in a body, or thrown together so as to form an elevation.

    a heap of earth; a heap of stones
  3. A great number or large quantity of things.

  4. A data structure consisting of trees in which each node is greater than all its children.

  5. Memory that is dynamically allocated.

    You should move these structures from the stack to the heap to avoid a potential stack overflow.
  6. A dilapidated place or vehicle.

    colloquial
    My first car was an old heap.
  7. A lot, a large amount.

    colloquial
    Thanks a heap!
Where this word comes from

From Middle English hepe, from Old English hēap, from Proto-West Germanic *haup, from Proto-Germanic *haupaz (compare Dutch hoop, German Low German Hupen, German Haufen), from Proto-Indo-European *koupos (“hill”) (compare Lithuanian kaũpas, Albanian qipi (“stack”), Avestan 𐬐𐬂𐬟𐬀 (kåfa)).

verb/hiːp//heːp/Ireland, dated
  1. To pile in a heap.

    transitive
    He heaped the laundry upon the bed and began folding.
  2. To form or round into a heap, as in measuring.

    transitive
  3. To supply in great quantity.

    transitive
    They heaped praise upon their newest hero.
Where this word comes from

From Middle English hepe, from Old English hēap, from Proto-West Germanic *haup, from Proto-Germanic *haupaz (compare Dutch hoop, German Low German Hupen, German Haufen), from Proto-Indo-European *koupos (“hill”) (compare Lithuanian kaũpas, Albanian qipi (“stack”), Avestan 𐬐𐬂𐬟𐬀 (kåfa)).

adv/hiːp//heːp/Ireland, dated
  1. very or much; representing broken English stereotypically or comically attributed to Native Americans

    not-comparable · offensive · possibly
Where this word comes from

From Middle English hepe, from Old English hēap, from Proto-West Germanic *haup, from Proto-Germanic *haupaz (compare Dutch hoop, German Low German Hupen, German Haufen), from Proto-Indo-European *koupos (“hill”) (compare Lithuanian kaũpas, Albanian qipi (“stack”), Avestan 𐬐𐬂𐬟𐬀 (kåfa)).

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.