Other forms: troupes
A troupe is a group of performers who work and travel together — actors, dancers, acrobats, clowns. The van outside the village hall, the costumes hanging in the back of it, twelve people who have shared a stage for years.
Say it and you say troop, exactly, so the two are worth keeping apart: a troop is soldiers or scouts, a troupe is people who perform. It nearly always takes of — a troupe of dancers, a troupe of jugglers — and you join a troupe, tour with one, leave one. A member is a trouper, and that word has drifted off on its own: call someone a real trouper and you mean they keep going without complaining, whatever the day has done to them. Troupe is warm rather than formal, and it carries a hint of the road with it — circuses, festivals, halls booked for a single night.
1nountroupeA company of performers who work and tour together.~86%
“The troupe arrived a day early to set up the stage.”
2noundanceA group of dancers who perform as one company.~14%
“She joined a ballet troupe at nineteen.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 107 sentences found in the wild and placed 99 of them on a sense (8 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
TROUPE → a GROUP
A group of clowns keeps climbing out of one small car outside the theatre. Ten of them, then twelve, then a drum and a ladder, and they all bow at the same moment.
hooks ontogroup
Troupe is troop borrowed twice. English took troop from French centuries ago and handed it to soldiers; then, around 1825, it reached for the same French word again, spelling and all, and kept the new copy for people who perform. One word, two jobs: troops march, troupes tour.
Proto-Indo-European
*treb-
French
troupe
English, today
troupe
Attested 1825; French troupe, which see for more. a doublet of troop, and possibly also of a doublet of thorp and dorp.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA