different between majority vs group

English

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /m??d?????ti/
• (US) IPA^(key): /m??d?????ti/, /m??d?????ti/
• Rhymes: -???ti

Etymology

From Middle French maiorité, from Medieval Latin m?i?rit?tem, accusative of Latin m?i?rit?s, from Latin m?i?r (“greater”).

Morphologically major +? -ity

Noun

majority (countable and uncountable, plural majorities)

1. More than half (50%) of some group.
2. The difference between the winning vote and the rest of the votes.

3. (dated) Legal adulthood, age of majority.

4. (Britain) The office held by a member of the armed forces in the rank of major.

5. Ancestors; ancestry.

Usage notes

• Majority in the sense of "more than half" is used with countable nouns only; for example, "The majority of the members of the committee were in favour of the motion." While common in colloquial speech, it is often considered incorrect to use majority with uncountable nouns, as in "The majority of the time was wasted." In the latter case, it is preferable to use expressions such as "the larger part of" or "most of" instead of the "the majority of."

Antonyms

• (more than half): minority

Hyponyms

Derived terms

• dictatorship of the majority
• go over to the majority
• join the majority
• majority leader
• majority rule
• supermajority
• tyranny of the majority

Related terms

• major
• plurality

See also

• most

Translations

English

Alternative forms

• groop (non-standard)
• groupe (obsolete)

Etymology

From French groupe (“cluster, group”), from Italian gruppo, groppo (“a knot, heap, group, bag (of money)”), from Vulgar Latin *cruppo, Renaissance Latin grupus, from Proto-Germanic *kruppaz (“lump, round mass, body, crop”), from Proto-Indo-European *grewb- (“to crumple, bend, crawl”). Cognate with German Kropf (“crop, craw, bunch”), Old English cropp, croppa (“cluster, bunch, sprout, flower, berry, ear of corn, crop”), Dutch krop (“craw”), Icelandic kroppr (“hump, bunch”). Doublet of crop and croup.

Pronunciation

• enPR: gro?op, IPA^(key): /??u?p/
• Rhymes: -u?p

Noun

group (plural groups)

1. A number of things or persons being in some relation to one another.

2. (group theory) A set with an associative binary operation, under which there exists an identity element, and such that each element has an inverse.
   • 1977, Roger C. Lyndon, Paul E. Schupp, Combinatorial Group Theory, Springer, page 192,

     Throughout this section, we shall assume the existence of finitely presented groups with unsolvable word problem.

   • 1992, Svetlana Katok, Fuchsian Groups, University of Chicago Press, page 112,

     In this chapter we give some examples of Fuchsian groups. The most interesting and important ones are the so-called "arithmetic" Fuchsian groups, i.e., discrete subgroups of PSL(2,R) obtained by some "arithmetic" operations. One such construction we have already seen: if we choose all matrices of SL(2,R) with integer coefficients, then the corresponding elements of PSL(2,R) form the modular group PSL(2,Z).

   • 2007, Zhong-Qi Ma, Group Theory for Physicists, World Scientific, page 277,

     In Chap. 4 the fundamental concepts on Lie groups have been introduced through the SO(3) group and its covering group SU(2).

3. (geometry, archaic) An effective divisor on a curve.
4. A (usually small) group of people who perform music together.

5. (astronomy) A small number (up to about fifty) of galaxies that are near each other.
6. (chemistry) A column in the periodic table of chemical elements.
7. (chemistry) A functional group.

8. (sociology) A subset of a culture or of a society.
9. (military) An air force formation.
10. (geology) A collection of formations or rock strata.
11. (computing) A number of users with same rights with respect to accession, modification, and execution of files, computers and peripherals.
12. An element of an espresso machine from which hot water pours into the portafilter.
13. (music) A number of eighth, sixteenth, etc., notes joined at the stems; sometimes rather indefinitely applied to any ornament made up of a few short notes.
14. (sports) A set of teams playing each other in the same division, while not during the same period playing any teams that belong to other sets in the division.
15. (business) A commercial organization.

Synonyms

• (number of things or persons being in some relation to each other): collection, set
• (people who perform music together): band, ensemble
• See also Thesaurus:group

Hypernyms

• (in group theory): monoid

Hyponyms

Derived terms

• subgroup

Related terms

Descendants

• ? Gulf Arabic: ?????
• ? Japanese: ???? (gur?pu)
• ? Korean: ?? (geurup)
• ? Tongan: kulupu

Translations

References

• group on Wikipedia.Wikipedia

Verb

group (third-person singular simple present groups, present participle grouping, simple past and past participle grouped)

1. (transitive) To put together to form a group.

   group the dogs by hair colour

2. (intransitive) To come together to form a group.

Synonyms

• (put together to form a group): amass, categorise/categorize, classify, collect, collect up, gather, gather together, gather up; see also Thesaurus:round up
• (come together to form a group): assemble, begather, foregather, throng; see also Thesaurus:assemble

Translations

Further reading

• group in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam, 1913.
• group in The Century Dictionary, New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911.