Other forms: coops, cooped
A coop is the small house hens sleep in. A chicken coop, shut the coop, clean out the coop.
It is the enclosed shelter, usually with a run attached, and shutting the coop at dusk is what keeps foxes out. Cooped up means shut in a small space for too long — the children were cooped up all week — which is the commonest use of the word for people who keep no chickens. Note co-op with a hyphen, which is a different word entirely, short for cooperative.
1nouncoopA small house for hens.
“The coop needs cleaning out about once a fortnight.”
2verbshutTo shut somebody or something into a small space.
“They were cooped up in one room for nine days.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
coop is an animal shelter.
Middle Dutch cupe meant a basket or cask, from Latin cupa, a barrel or tub — the same root as cup and cupola. A coop was a wicker basket for poultry before it was a wooden house for them.
Middle Dutch
cûpe
English, today
coop
Built from
From coupe, cupe, from cȳpe or possibly from Middle Dutch cûpe (compare modern Dutch kuip, stq kupe, Middle Low German kûpe), from kûpa, côpa (“cask”) (compare Middle Low German kôpe, Old High German chôfa, chuofa, Middle High German kuofe, modern regional German Kufe (“cask”)), probably from cupa, copa (thus a a doublet of coupe and cup and keeve). However, the Oxford English Dictionary notes that if the word is from Latin, “it is difficult to account for the umlaut in cýpe*”.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA