Home › Glossary › Letter C

cropping

Farming
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

The act of feeding by biting or grazing on growing vegetation; in pastoral poetry, this term grounds scenes of rustic life and emphasizes the delicate, destructive interaction between livestock and landscape.

Detailed Definition
In the line “the lambs were cropping,” the verb describes lambs grazing by repeatedly biting off grass or other plants. This agricultural sense is less familiar than the modern meaning of cropping as cutting or shortening.
Example
Example in poetry:
“Why did you die when the lambs were cropping?” (A. E. Housman) uses cropping for animals feeding close to the ground; “Ewes were cropping the new grass beside the grave” joins pastoral life to mourning; In farming language, a crop is both what is grown and the act of grazing or harvesting; The quiet verb can sharpen elegy by contrasting seasonal renewal with death
Additional Notes
“Cropping” may puzzle readers because the quoted line uses it in the specialized agricultural sense of grazing.; Found in the poem, A Dirge by Christina Rossetti
Also Known As
harvesting gathering cropping season reaping
Skip to main content