Other forms: crowds, crowded, crowding
A crowd is a large mass of people gathered in one place. A big crowd, in the crowd, crowd control.
Crowd behaviour is a real field of study, and crowd density rather than crowd size is what makes a gathering dangerous — above about five people a square metre, individuals lose control of where they move. As a verb, to crowd is to press in. Note crowded; follow the crowd; and crowdfunding and crowdsourcing, which borrow the word for many small contributions.
1nouncrowdA large mass of people gathered in one place.
“A huge crowd gathered outside the stadium before the match.”
2verbpressTo press in around something.
“Fans crowded around the singer to get her autograph.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
crowd is a mass of people.
Old English crudan meant to press or push, and the noun came from the verb — a crowd is people pressing. The Proto-Indo-European root means to push.
Middle English
crouden
English, today
crowd
From Middle English crouden. From Middle English crouden, from Old English crūdan, from Proto-West Germanic krūdan, from Proto-Germanic krūdaną, kreudaną, ultimately from Proto-Indo-European grewt- (“to push; press”). Cognate with German Low German kroden (“to push, shove”), Dutch kruien (“to push, shove”). group of people, mob Compare typologically throng (<<~ þrinhwaną); dav (akin to дави́ть, да́вка); ciżba, ścisk (<~ ciskać, akin to ти́скать); tłok, толчея́ (akin to толка́ть).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA