Language question: when, and why, did “trooper” become “troop”? Over in GD someone mentioned that “11 troops” were killed, but instead of “11 groups of soldiers,” they meant “11 individuals.”
Language changes etc. etc., but this seems to be a recent one and I didn’t get the memo. What I’m really curious about, however, is what prompted this change. I can’t think of a parallel example. Do we say “paratroops” now instead of “paratroopers,” too?
I’m 52, and I have always heard it used in this manner.
If you said “11 troopers killed” I’d assume you were referring to police officers.
It’s been like that for as long as I can remember. It didn’t then and still doesn’t make sense to me. When I hear something like “they pulled 8000 troops out of the middle east”, in my mind that reads as 8000x(amount of people in a troop) soldiers. So, maybe 80,000 or 100,000 people.
The word ‘troop’, to me, doesn’t make sense when applied to an individual.
To me, the closest similar example I can think of, mostly because it’s just one that annoys me so it stands out when I hear it is saying ‘foot’ instead of ‘feet’. For example ‘These 4x4 posts are 6 foot long’ or ‘How wide are the treads?’/“three foot”.
Feet…it’s feet. The stair treads are three feet long, the fence post is 6 feet tall.
ETA, and on preview I see someone also mentioned the other thing I was thinking of. I’ve never heard trooper used to refer to anyone other than a state trooper.
I’m older than that and ditto.
Using a singular unit of measure with a number > 1 is not restricted to “foot”. For example, telescopes are often refered to by the diameter of their primary mirror in this way: 200 inch Palomar telescope. This is a peculiarity of English, since I believe most other languages use the plural in that construction.
Okay. Perhaps I should rephrase:
In military usage, a “troop” used to be a group of soldiers; “troops,” then, meant groups of soldiers.
Now, “troop” seems to be only used for individial soldiers.
When did it stop referring to a group? Or does it still, and it’s just clear from context?
As for the use of the singular for the plural (outside of adjectives as in “four-foot post”), like six head of cattle, I think that’s a different linguistic phenomenon, and restricted to certain nouns. I say “two pair of pants” because “two pairs” sounds wrong, but most people I know say “two pairs.”
I’ve only ever heard (and assumed) “troop” to mean an individual rather than a group of soldiers.
I was going to ask if you could point to a usage of the word “troop” meaning a group of soldiers, but I guess maybe “F-Troop” would be a good example? (It’s before my time.)
So was it common usage then (in the late '60s) for “Troop” to mean a group?
I think when you write 200-inch telescope, “200-inch” is an adjective and sounds totally normal to me (a native English speaker). I think that’s different than saying “six head of cattle” or “those posts are 6 foot long,” although I’ve never heard the latter of those. But I think if you said they are 6-foot posts, that would be grammatically correct (in English).
The first hit for “troop” in google books for me is A Troop of Little Dinosaurs from 1998, which clearly has the group meaning but not the individual meaning.
(I first typed “groop”—damn English.)
For what it’s worth, in the U.S. military, a “troop” is specifically a U.S. Army Cavalry unit, roughly equivalent to an infantry company. It’s a mostly obsolete term nowadays, as is the concept of a “cavalry” unit, but it’s still used for some units for purposes of historical continuity and esprit de corps. None of the other services ever used “troop” as a designation for a type of unit.
“F Troop”, mentioned upthread, was a fictionalized U.S. Cavalry unit, and so used the “troop” designation. As an aside, the troops would be designated A Troop, B Troop, and so forth. F Troop would be the sixth troop in its squadron. U.S. Army Cavalry squadrons usually contained 3 - 5 troops. Part of the joke (it was a sitcom) is that an “F” troop would be a superfluous designation in most historical cavalry units.
State troopers, as in officers of state police forces, are commonly called that because many state police forces were explicitly organized on the model of the U.S. Cavalry, to include having units designated as “troops”.
Troop is still used as a group of soldiers: the cavalry uses troops in the same way that the infantry uses the term platoon: a unit comprised of 2-4 squads, with about 30 to 40 soldiers.
The usage of this word is weird.
Cambridge Dictionary defines “troop” as “a group of soldiers or police, esp. one equipped with horses”. Merriam-Webster says “a group of soldiers; a cavalry unit corresponding to an infantry company; troops plural”. Dictionary.com says “an assemblage of persons or things; company; band; a great number or multitude”. I haven’t found any dictionary that endorses “troop” to mean an individual.
On the other hand, I’ve heard it used that way and in some contexts it sounds ok to me. But it’s not usable in all contexts. It seems ok to say “fifteen troops were killed” but it sounds totally wrong to say “John is a troop”.
I asked almost the exact same question, right here, almost 17 years ago!
May want to read your sources more carefully. The definition you are looking for is often not the first one on the page although your [noparse]www.merriam-webster.com[/noparse] link lists it as definition 1c.
It’s interesting that the dictionaries by and large accept this definition for “troops” (plural) but not for “troop” (singular) as in the OP. For example:
Seems odd to me as I’ve heard “troop” for soldier as long anyone in this thread who said specifically how long they’ve heard it and that’s half-centuryish.
Yeah, I mangled the end of that MW quote, but I did check all the definitions and none support “troop” as meaning “a soldier”.
I can see using “troops” meaning “soldiers”; that’s the “fifteen troops were killed” example. I don’t see an example in this thread where the word “troop” can mean a single soldier, and I can’t concoct an example. That’s the weirdness I was commenting on. It can be used in the plural but not in the singular.
It is all about the context.
Troop for a long time in US usage is a cavalry formation at the equivalent level as a Company or Battery. The battalion equivalent for US cavalry organizations is the squadron. In some foreign militaries the troop is a platoon or section equivalent. Historical usage in the US can vary so you have to know your era.
Troop is also a singular service member in common usage. The plural is also troops.
Trooper is also in common usage inside US Army cavalry organizations. It is one service member.
A troop assigned to a US cavalry troop is commonly called a trooper. Too easy right? 
singular = trooper
plural = troops
It’s just one of those odd words, like “brethren” or “octopodes”.
200 inch telescope sounds find just like 6 foot piece of wood sounds okay.
It would sound strange if someone asked how big the telescope is and you said “It’s 200 inch”.
That’s a nice, clear description of the phenomenon. It doesn’t really explain the semantic process that brought it about, nor when.
After all, in theory at least, a member of a brigade is a brigadier. We didn’t suddenly start calling brigadiers brigades. Not a great example, because “brigadier” is mostly used as “brigadier general.” Nor do “squaddies” get called “squads,” but I think that’s still more of a slang term.
In civilian life, we didn’t start referring to “gangsters” or “gangbangers” as “gangs.”
We do refer to members of a “faculty” (the group) as individual “faculty,” short for faculty members, but that’s not supplanting an earlier derivative.
New York Times 1853:
“Three of the Government troops were killed and five wounded.”
From a discussion of this issue on the Grammarphobia blog.
I regularly heard “troop” to refer to individuals when I was in Army AIT in 1990. Drill sergeants would commonly use it like “hey troop, what are you doing, get over here”, etc. It was never confusing; when they were yelling at me I never thought to look over my shoulder to see if a company-sized cavalry unit was goofing off behind me.
Edit: this was medical AIT, not cavalry, so I have no idea where this came from. The military culture of that whole 1973-1990 era seems to have more or less disappeared due to lack of popular interest in it, at least compared to other eras.