Farm

How to spell farm

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce farm

What does farm mean?

1. nounAn area of land and its buildings used for growing crops or raising animals.
2. verbTo use land to grow crops or raise animals as a business.

Farm in a sentence

• noun

  The farm produces enough wheat to supply three local bakeries.

• verb

  His family has chosen to farm this valley for over a century.

• noun

  They bought a small farm with a barn and forty acres of pasture.

• verb

  They decided to farm organically and stopped using chemical sprays.

Where does farm come from?

Language of origin: French

This word comes from the Old French ferme, meaning a fixed payment, rent, or lease, which in turn came from the Medieval Latin firma, a settled or fixed sum. The Latin root behind it is firmare, 'to fix or settle', built on firmus meaning 'firm' or 'steady', the same root that gives us the English word firm. In its earliest English use, around the 1300s, a farm was not a field at all but the fixed yearly rent a tenant paid for the right to work a piece of land. Over time the meaning slid from the payment to the land that was leased, and by the 1500s a farm had become the cultivated holding itself. The spelling is reassuringly phonetic, so the surprise here is purely historical: the word is a cousin of 'firm' and 'confirm' rather than a relative of any farming term.

How the word is built

• farm (whole word; from Old French ferme: a fixed rent or lease)