Flow

How to spell flow

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce flow

What does flow mean?

1. verbTo move steadily and continuously, the way a liquid does.
2. nounA steady, continuous movement or stream of something.

Flow in a sentence

• verb

  Engineers redesigned the channel so the river could flow more freely.

• noun

  The new software tracks the flow of money through each department.

• verb

  Traffic began to flow smoothly once the roadworks ended.

• noun

  A constant flow of customers kept the shop busy all day.

Where does flow come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Flow is a thoroughly native English word, descending from the Old English verb flowan, meaning 'to stream, run as a liquid, or rise as the tide'. It belongs to a wide Germanic family, with cousins in Dutch vloeien and related forms across the North Sea languages, all built on a root sense of liquid in motion. Linguists trace it further back to a Proto-Indo-European root meaning 'to swell' or 'flow', which surprisingly also feeds Latin pluere 'to rain'. Over the centuries the meaning broadened beyond water to cover anything that moves smoothly and continuously, from traffic and conversation to data and money. The spelling kept the historic 'ow' ending, the same one we see in 'grow' and 'glow', which is why the word looks regular and rarely trips writers up.

How the word is built

• flow (from Old English flowan, to flow or stream), single native root with no affixes