heap

1) A crowd; a throng; a rabble.--Johnson. This very old sense of the word is now provincial both in England and in this country. The expressions, 'a heap of men,' 'a heap of horses,' are given by Holloway in his Dictionary of Provincialisms. In the Western States it is in very common use; as, 'A heap of people were present at the election,' etc.

Now is that of God a full fayre grace

That awhiche a lewd man's wit shall pace

The wisdom of an heap of lered men?--Chaucer, The Prologue.

A cruel tyranny; a heap of vassals and slaves, no freeman, no inheritance, no stirp or ancient families.--Bacon. (Todd's J.)

An universal cry resounds aloud,

The sailors run in heaps, a helpless crowd.--Dryden.

A heap of likely young fellows courted me, but I refused them all for the head coachman of Counsellor Carter.--Davis's Travels in America in 1798, p. 237.

2) A great deal; much. So used at the South and West.

A correspondent in the Commercial Advertiser thus notices the various uses of this word at the South:

Heap is a most prolific word in the Carolinas and Georgia among the common people, and with children at least, in the best regulated families. "How do you like Mr. Smith?" I asked. "Oh! I liked him a heap," will be the answer, if affirmative, in five cases out of six. It is synonymous with a majority, or a great many as, "We should have plenty of peaches, but a heap of them were killed by the frost." It is synonymous even with very, as, "I heard him preach a heap often;" "Oh! I'm lazy a heap."

I was not idle, for I had a heap of talk with the folks in the house.--Crockett, Tour, p. 87.

Baltimore used to be called Mob-town; but they are a heap better now, and are more orderly than some of their neighbors.--Ibid. p. 13.