Heap

//hiːp// adv, name, noun, verb, slang

adv, name, noun, verb, slang ·Very common ·Middle school level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A crowd; a throng; a multitude or great number of people.

    "A Heap of Vassals, and Slaues: […] A People that is without Naturall Affection, […] A Nation without Morality, without Letters, Arts, or Sciences"

  2. 2
    Acronym of high explosive armor-piercing. abbreviation, acronym, alt-of
  3. 3
    a car that is old and unreliable wordnet
  4. 4
    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"

  5. 5
    a collection of objects laid on top of each other wordnet
Show 6 more definitions
  1. 6
    A great number or large quantity of things.

    "a vast heap, both of places of scripture and quotations"

  2. 7
    (often followed by ‘of’) a large number or amount or extent wordnet
  3. 8
    A data structure consisting of trees in which each node is greater than all its children.
  4. 9
    Memory that is dynamically allocated.

    "You should move these structures from the stack to the heap to avoid a potential stack overflow."

  5. 10
    A dilapidated place or vehicle. colloquial

    "My first car was an old heap."

  6. 11
    A lot, a large amount colloquial

    "Thanks a heap!"

Verb
  1. 1
    To pile in a heap. transitive

    "He heaped the laundry upon the bed and began folding."

  2. 2
    fill to overflow wordnet
  3. 3
    To form or round into a heap, as in measuring. transitive

    "Cry a reward, to him who shall first bring News of that vanished Arabian, A full-heap’d helmet of the purest gold."

  4. 4
    arrange in stacks wordnet
  5. 5
    To supply in great quantity. transitive

    "They heaped praise upon their newest hero."

Show 1 more definition
  1. 6
    bestow in large quantities wordnet
Adverb
  1. 1
    very or much; representing broken English stereotypically or comically attributed to Native Americans not-comparable, offensive, possibly

    "Chuckaway too no good. Heap water, little chuckaway. Heap sticks, and still little chuckaway."

Proper Noun
  1. 1
    A surname.

Synonyms

All synonyms
pilebatchbusstackabundanceaccord

Example

More examples

"Fan letters lay in a heap on the desk."

Etymology

Etymology 1

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)).

Etymology 2

English surname, from the noun heap.

Related phrases

Heap Bridgeall of a heapant-heapash heap of historyash-heapash-heap-cakeat the top of the heapcompost heapdung heapdung-heapdust heap of historygarbage heap of history

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.