Harvest

How to spell harvest

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce harvest

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does harvest mean?

1. nounThe gathering of ripe crops, or the crops gathered in a season.
2. verbTo gather or collect a crop, or to extract something for use.

Harvest in a sentence

• noun

  The farmers hoped for a good harvest after the wet summer.

• verb

  Workers begin to harvest the wheat as soon as it ripens.

• noun

  A poor harvest pushed grain prices higher across the region.

• verb

  The company built machines that harvest rainwater from the roof.

Where does harvest come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Harvest comes straight from the Old English word hærfest, which originally meant 'autumn', the season when crops were gathered in. It traces back to a Germanic root shared with the Dutch herfst and the German Herbst, both still meaning 'autumn', and ultimately to an ancient root meaning 'to pick' or 'to pluck', the same source that gave Latin carpere 'to seize' (as in 'carpe diem'). For centuries the word named the season itself, but as English shifted to calling that time of year 'autumn' and 'fall', harvest narrowed to mean the act and the produce of gathering ripened crops. The spelling preserves the older English form closely, with the silent-feeling middle that trips writers: it is a clean -vest ending, not -vist, and there is no double consonant to worry about. The verb sense, meaning to reap or collect, grew naturally out of the noun and was well established by the late Middle Ages.

How the word is built

• harvest (from Old English hærfest 'autumn, the gathering of crops'); a single root with no separable affixes