Other forms: heaps, heaped, heaping
A heap is a messy mound of things thrown together. A heap of clothes, a compost heap, in a heap.
It differs from a pile in being untidy: things are piled deliberately and heaped carelessly. Heaps as an informal plural means a lot — heaps of time, heaps better — which is chiefly British and Australian. Collapse in a heap means to fall down exhausted. In computing, the heap is a region of memory. Note heap praise on somebody, meaning to give a great deal of it at once.
1nounheapA messy mound of things thrown together.
“There was a heap of clothes on the chair for about a month.”
2verbpileTo pile things up carelessly or generously.
“They heaped praise on a report nobody had read.”
heap is a mound.
Also accepted in games: pile
Old English heap comes from a Germanic root meaning a crowd or a mass — it meant a group of people as often as a pile of things. The Proto-Indo-European ancestor meant a hill.
Proto-Indo-European
*koupos — hill
Proto-Germanic
*haupaz
Proto-West Germanic
*haup
Old English
hēap
Middle English
hepe
English, today
heap
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”), ae 𐬐𐬂𐬟𐬀).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA